


Meat Jacket (Twenty First Century Fandom Remix)

by Ayulsa (execharmonious)



Series: Meat Jacket [1]
Category: Bubblegum Crisis
Genre: Bikeshipping, Cybernetics, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, Dubious Science, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/F, Priss Swears A Lot, Psychological Horror, Suicidal Thoughts, really the entire thing is dubious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-02-13 22:46:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 43,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2168040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/execharmonious/pseuds/Ayulsa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Priss is taking the slow road to hell, and Sylia's riding shotgun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. (Priss) Stage Dive

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Meat Jacket (unpublished synopsis)](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/68634) by Adam Warren. 



> There is no original Meat Jacket fic, as such. This story spins (very loosely) off the planned-but-never-published BGC comic mini-series, meant to have followed Grand Mal. 2 parts OVA canon, 1 part Adam Warren canon (ssh I liked it okay). Blend and serve with severed limbs.
> 
> Thanks to [magistrate](http://archiveofourown.org/users/magistrate) for showing me some whole new ways to look at text in narrative, which absolutely inspired some of the formatting decisions in this story.

The laser lights and dry ice mist seemed to melt into each other, a soupy neon glow that she could almost taste. Priss breathed in hard, her chest tightening as she drank in the rush from the audience, the glowstick trails that left lemon-cherry-tangerine slashes across her vision. In this moment she was invulnerable.

She held it for as long as she could, that swell before the first note, the anticipation that turned her heart to a ticking bomb. Then she grabbed the mike, metallic taste in her mouth, lunging in to meet the roar of the crowd. A warm wave of applause broke over her, stomping and whistling, glowsticks spinning, something mechanical screeching, squealing...

Her eyes scanned the crowd. _What was that?_ Already jittery, she felt her heart start to claw at the insides of her chest, her body bowstring taut. _Boomer?_ She lost the thread of the song as her eyes darted from one face to another, trying to pick out the impostor. A blue smear here, a red flash there; too easy for them to hide in this crowd, among the lights that were stinging her eyes. But she was sure they were there, more sure with each passing moment as the surging crowd rearranged itself into a tangle of vast, armoured limbs, tearing their way free of once-human bodies, lunging for the stage...

"Boomers!" She tossed the mike and fled the stage, pausing only to look back at her bandmates, who were staring, frozen in fear. "Evacuate! Everybody out!" The others continued to stare at her as if she'd lost her mind; the tidal wave of arms crashed over the stage, splintering the cheap wood, and before she could shout the whole thing gave way and her bandmates were swallowed up, lost in the stampede.

 _Shit, shit, shit..._ She ran for the dressing room, flung open drawers, rifling through with shaking hands for the thing she sought. She mashed the button on the comm link several times before remembering: she wasn't in the Knight Sabers any more. Sylia had put her on "indefinite leave" when things had started going to shit, which was Sylia's fake-polite-bullshit way of saying "you're fired". _Fucking asshole,_ she growled under her breath as she grabbed her phone and hit Sylia on speed-dial.

The phone rang for what felt like days as carnage raged outside. The flimsy door separating her from the stage would cave in a moment if they tried to break through, and the sounds were getting closer.

The line went live. "Sylia," she managed, suddenly breathless. All she'd done was sprint backstage, but her chest felt like it was on fire. "Boomer attack. I'm-- I'm at the club."

Sylia's reply took longer than expected; she could hear Mackie's voice in the background, but she couldn't make out words. " _Now,_ dammit!"

"We're on our way," Sylia finally spoke. "Keep calm. Don't do anything rash."

" _Rash?_ There's an army of f-fucking B-Boomers out there and you want me to--" The line went dead. " _Fuck_ you!" The phone flew across the room and landed in a trash can with a hollow ring. Priss rubbed her face with her hands.

 _If they hadn't cut me off, if I had my suit, I could fight..._ The walls shook with something like club bass, something like pounding hands. _I'm not going to die in this shithole alone!_ She scanned the room, searching for anything she could use as a weapon. The trash can, a lamp cord... _you can't strangle a Boomer,_ she thought, _but one could strangle you,_ and at that thought she smelt the stench of oil and felt cold hands around her throat. She kicked and scrabbled against her attacker, trying to pry off the icy grip, but her fingers were failing, numb, her boots squeaking uselessly against the floor. Something wet and warm trickled from her ear, and the ground rose up to greet her, in a grey wave that made no sound.

***

"--ss? Priss, wake up. You have to get up now."

She groaned at the noise and the rough shaking, struggling to open eyelids sticky with blood. She managed, partway, and the slight crack was enough to let in light that she winced against.

"...gah! Bright!" she hissed, screwing them shut again. _Light...? What time...? Where...?_ Also, something was making noise. Annoying noise. _Alarm clock...?_ She flailed and tried to smack it, and instead, her hand hit something fleshy. She lifted her head-- _**fuck** that hurt_ \-- and squinted, confused.

A woman was looking down at her, calmly peeling Priss' fingers from her face. It took her a moment to register that it was Sylia. _Sylia... Boomers._ She pushed herself to her knees, sloppily smacking Sylia again in the process; the urge to vomit hit her, and she doubled over, panting. "Boomers... what happened?" Her mouth felt as dry as old cigarette butts, and tasted about the same. "Did you bring... hardsuit?" If they were still out there... if she had to fight...

"There were no Boomers, Priss," said Sylia, in that same cool tone she used for everything. "You were hallucinating again." Priss felt her rage simmer again just hearing it. What right did she have to be so calm? She wasn't the one who'd almost been killed-- she wasn't the one who... Before she knew it, her hands were making fists, and then Sylia was shoving a lamp in her face, which was confusing enough that she forgot what she'd been angry about.

"Were you trying to kill yourself this time? What is this?"

Priss blinked at the change of topic. Her brain still felt like warmed-over dog shit, and this was hardly making it easier to think. "Th'hell are you talking about? There was an attack, you--"

Sylia dangled the lamp cord. "Then why do I come in here to find you lying here, half-dead, with this"-- she made the cord swing --"wrapped around your neck, and no signs that anyone broke in?"

A _click_ , and Sylia was now flashing a compact mirror at her. Time seemed to keep snapping into place like this, she thought, these disjointed stop-starts, like someone was timing her with a stopwatch: click, click. Or taking her photograph. One moment no longer bled into another, as it had on the stage, but felt too precisely, mechanically arranged. Maybe Sylia was really a Boomer in disguise. Maybe the Boomers had got into her head. She shook her head to try to clear it, and finally caught sight of her face.

Clammy, blotchy and streaked with blood, her makeup a sad mess of panda eyes and rouge smears: she looked worse than shit. But something else caught her attention, her hand going automatically to the welts on her neck. Thin, red welts: not the kind fingers would make at all. The kind an electrical cord would make.

"But-- but-- s, someone was here!" she slurred, clenching her fists again. "Why the fuck would I do this to myself?"

A hand grabbed her wrist, gently but firmly, twisted her arm until she was staring at her own track-marked inner elbow.

"Believe me, Priss," said Sylia, with a note in her voice that stood out to her as odd. "I would _love_ it if you could answer that question."


	2. (Sylia) High Ride

Sylia loaded the still half-conscious and complaining Priss into the car, the bar owner shouting after them.

"You come to take her home? Good! And make sure she _stays_ home! Yeah, you heard me, you bitch, you ain't playin' here no more! Fuckin'..." His tirade was lost amid a screech of tires and a weak middle finger from Priss as Sylia drove off.

Almost as soon as they pulled away, Priss slumped against the window, apparently drained by the meager show of defiance. Sylia spent a few guilty moments satisfying herself that she was, in fact, still breathing before letting her mind drift back to the events of the last few hours.

_The moment she heard Priss' voice over the phone-- breathless in a way she'd never been from just running, weak the way a wounded Priss never was-- she looked to Mackie, who was staring intently at something on his screen that was almost certainly not work-related-- or work-safe. Covering the mouthpiece with a hand, she said, "It's Priss. Says there's been a Boomer attack at the club. Can you check the patrol bulletins and see if they're saying anything?"_

_Scrambling to look innocent-- an act that was never successful by the nature of the thing-- Mackie hopped the frequencies for a few moments before pulling off his headset. "Nope, nothing. Of course, the AD Police are always pretty slow-- I'll keep checking..."_

_Sylia waved him off. "No need." Pinching the bridge of her nose and exhaling a sharp sigh, she pushed her chair from the desk, standing up. "I'm going to drive by and see what's going on."_

_"Alone?" said Mackie, who was now holding half the headset up to his ear. "But if there_ is _a Boomer..."_

_"There won't be." She took her hand from over the phone. "We're on our way. Keep calm. Don't do anything rash."_

Not that those words meant anything to Priss. There was a groan from the passenger seat, and Sylia glanced over to see Priss twitching spasmodically. Though she still wasn't quite sure how she'd managed to get that cord wrapped around her throat-- while convinced she was fighting with an intruder, no less-- she highly suspected it had something to do with her current disoriented state, and the needle marks running up her arms. She hadn't even bothered to hide them with her stage outfit: the leather micro-miniskirt and matching brassiere left not only her arms, but a number of other large bruises exposed, no doubt from less recent breaks from reality. Did she just not care, or was she truly oblivious to the way her life was spiralling out of control?

With Priss, it could be either. She spared her passenger another glance, then had to look away.

_This is all my fault._ She'd recruited a self-destructive, clearly unstable teenager into her little band of mercenaries, then kicked her to the curb when she got to be too much to handle. As if, by taking her in and profiting from her skills, she hadn't inherited some measure of responsibility for her mental health-- such as it was.

Or had been, when she'd first acquired Priss' services. Priss had been shaky from the start, but she'd been surviving on the streets well enough for some years. It was only after a while in her employ, fighting Boomers and sometimes humans, that her mental state had nosedived. She'd always been a loner, but now she'd drop off the radar for days at a time, refusing to answer calls. And when she did call in, she was inevitably drunk, or worse; unable to find her own way home, lying on the roadside with a broken nose, her wallet gone and her back pockets stuffed with drugs. Word on the street was she seldom showed up for performances sober any more, if she showed up at all-- though her shows were as good as ever, Sylia had to admit, having sat in on one or two. It was like the only thing keeping her going was the songs: the chance to be real for a moment, to pour her heart out in verse. Her drive for everything else, including the Knight Sabers, seemed to have vanished.

And then she'd started seeing Boomers.

Even then, with her grasp on reality clearly hanging in the balance, Sylia had tried to convince herself that she could wash her hands of the girl. That Priss could choose to pull herself back together, and that if she let herself go, if she gave in to weakness, then it was her own decision. As if a thousand and one little things, many of them in Priss' past but a significant amount orchestrated by Sylia, hadn't been building up to this moment, with little say from Priss in the matter.

She'd treated Priss as a failure and let her go. But the Knight Sabers weren't tools; they were a team. Priss hadn't failed that team, Sylia realised now; she had. She'd failed Priss, and all of them, by putting her own feelings first.

_How very unlike me, I'm sure they'd all say. If only they knew._

Another groan issued from beside her, and Priss blinked groggily and looked around, as if only now noticing where she was.

"You didn't bring the truck," she said. Meaning: _You didn't bring the other Sabers._

Sylia fixed her eyes on the road. "I didn't need to." Meaning: _I didn't believe you._

"Would've felt better if... you'd brought the truck." Meaning: _I would've felt better if you'd believed me._

Another failure. Priss sagged back into her seat, and Sylia tried to ignore her. The drive continued in silence.

***

At Sylia's place, she half-dropped, half-rolled Priss onto the couch, and for the first time was able to get a good look at the state she was in. Despite Priss' protests, the lighting in the dressing room had barely been enough to see by. Now that they were in a more brightly-lit room, she could see just how dilated Priss' pupils were. They tracked her around the room as if she expected Sylia to pounce on her at any moment.

She hung up her jacket, stashing Priss' bag and keys discreetly in the closet, then headed for the kitchen. "How long since you ate, Priss?"

"'M not hungry," came the response from the living room.

"How long since you drank anything that wasn't alcoholic?"

Priss mumbled something incoherent, which she expected would have been just as incoherent if she hadn't been in the next room. She returned with a medkit and a glass of water, the latter of which she pushed into Priss' hands before tearing open a packet of antiseptic wipes and swabbing off the makeup and dried blood, rather more roughly than was called for. "Drink."

"Hard to drink when you're all up in my face," Priss mumbled around Sylia's ministrations. She managed to get in a sip anyway, then let out a sound between a cough and a whine. "My throat hurts."

"That's probably because you strangled yourself." Sylia popped a thermometer out of one end of the medkit and shoved it in Priss' mouth, just to be sure. "How long have you been doing this?"

Priss muttered something else around the plastic strip-- ever since that one time, all her thermometers were shatterproof-- and Sylia pulled it from her mouth. "What was that?"

"I _said,_ 'Doing what'," Priss said with an eyeroll that looked strange in her drugged state.

"This." Sylia tapped two fingers against the bruises on Priss' arm, making her wince. "Stuffing your veins full of God only knows what. Blacking out. Hallucinating Boomers."

Priss turned to her with eyes suddenly too clear, too bright. For a haunting moment, Sylia felt something she was entirely unused to: she felt transparent.

"How long?" she snarled, all the while pinning her with those burning eyes, eyes that a moment ago had seemed hollow, clouded, and now seemed to see everything she was. "The fuck do you mean, 'how long'?" She swung her glass at Sylia, knocking the medkit from her hands and soaking the both of them. "I can't believe you! You-- you choose _now_ to act like some fucking, some _mother_ figure"-- she pushed herself off the couch, lunging at Sylia, who dodged-- "like you give, like you give two fucking _shits_ about me, about _any_ of us!" She was advancing now, bearing down on Sylia. "If you hadn't dropped me the second it happened like I was fucking used goods-- if you ever _once_ pulled your head out of your own fucking ass, you wouldn't even have to ask that question! So don't come to me with-- with--"

Priss stopped short, suddenly pale. Sylia rushed forward to catch her, gripping her arms as Priss tried feebly to fend her off, her eyelids fluttering, shoulders shaking with what might have been weakness and might have been unexpressed rage.

"Easy," said Sylia, guiding her back towards the couch. Priss fought but eventually collapsed back into her seat, breathing far too heavily. Drawing herself up small, she clutched the sides of her head with clawed hands, fingers digging into flesh until her knuckles whitened. "Monster... away from me... you monster..." Fingers turned to fists, and she began beating them against her head, letting out a keening wail.

This time Sylia made no move to stop her from hurting herself, letting her ride it out as the word echoed inside her head. _Monster._ She knew it was Priss' delusions talking, but she also knew that, at their core, most delusions stemmed from a grain of truth. In one moment of drug-fueled clarity, Priss had seen to the heart of her, and found something on which, it seemed, they could now both agree.

_You're a monster, Sylia Stingray. And you've made monsters of them now, too._


	3. (Priss) Sick Shift

Priss woke in the dark to a silent room. Pushing off her blanket, she groped around blindly, trying to remember where-- and _when_ \-- she was. It had been night when they'd left the club, hadn't it? Had she only slept for a couple of hours, or was this the next evening? 

She swung her feet over the edge of her bunk, expecting to find a ladder, and almost pitched forward when she felt wooden flooring under her feet instead. She'd believed so fervently that Sylia would be bringing her back to the trailer that she'd never actually registered where she was.

"No, no, no..." Snapping alert, she started feeling around the couch in search of anything that could prove her wrong, or at least capable of making it through the next few hours: her keys, her stash, the magazines and clothes that lay around on her bed. She had to be at home; she had to be confused. But her search turned up nothing, and panic sped through her, culminating in a cry that startled even her. She was used to hearing her own growls of frustration, but right now she sounded helpless. Beaten.

Priss had been many things in her life: orphan, street kid, gang member, Knight Saber. All of them had put her through their own different hells. But one thing she'd never been, through all of it, was as beaten as she felt now.

The thought pulled her up fast, and she tried to slow her racing mind, raking her hands through her hair. _No,_ she told herself, _I don't need to be home. I need to be here. Sylia brought me here for a reason. Going home would only make things worse._

But the other part of her, the part that craved, wasn't to be outdone. _What does that bitch even know? Sylia can't help me-- she **won't** help me. I have to fix this myself._ The thoughts were already creeping up on her again, pressing, insidious: Sylvie dying, Sylvie dead, Priss pulling the trigger. _Like hell she doesn't know what this is about,_ she thought of Sylia, scratching red welts into the side of her head to try and numb the other, intrusive thoughts. It wasn't working. Without the drugs, it was only a matter of time before her demons closed in, and took out their bloody revenge.

Her eyes were adjusting now, picking out shapes in the room that slowly resolved, in her muddled mind, into her memory of Sylia's penthouse. No keys, no bag, nothing out of place; she must have left them back at the club. But there was one thing of hers here she needed.

If the Boomers came back, she was going to be ready.

***

Fifteen minutes, a stolen hardsuit, and an equally (though unrelatedly) stolen bike later, Priss was weaving her way through highway traffic. Leaning into the hard metal chassis, feeling the broad beast thrum beneath her chest, made her feel a little better already. She hadn't been able to outpace her demons for a long time, but the thunder shaking her bones drowned out the shuddering of her heart, and the g-force keeping her pressed to the bike calmed the urges to scream and destroy.

_Just you and me now, kid,_ she thought to the machine, stroking a hardsuited hand over its curves. _Just you and me._ It wasn't her bike, but already it was a better friend to her than most of the people she could name. Bikes didn't judge. Bikes didn't betray. Bikes didn't dump you when times got rough.

Everything felt sluggish after a night off the drugs, the billboards she passed seeming to linger in sight far longer than they should. She glanced down at the bike's clock and felt a jump in her stomach as she noted the time: 5:01 a.m. Hadn't it been 5:01 several minutes ago? A nervous sweat began to break out under her suit, and she revved the engine higher, squeezing the sides of her steed with her thighs as if she could urge it on that way. _Just a little more, baby. I gotta get home now. You understand._

She pushed back a pang of guilt at the theft, and tried to keep her eyes on the road. It wasn't as if it was her first time-- she'd been lifting bikes since her gang days-- but these days she tried to keep that sort of thing to Knight Saber-related emergencies. (Had tried, she corrected herself. She wasn't a Knight Saber any more.) She could have taken the subway to Hot Legs, picked up her keys and her bike from there, and rode home without breaking any laws, at least until she got to her trailer. But the thought of standing around waiting for the train while her demons coalesced around her had thrust her into a panic, and she'd grabbed the first bike she saw.

_I'll return it, really I will,_ she told herself. _I just need to be faster. I need to get free._

***

Pulling up beside her trailer, Priss flipped up her visor, then winced as the encroaching dawn stung her eyes. _Maybe not the best idea right now,_ she thought, and lowered it again. She was admittedly a night owl at the best of times, but the light never usually bothered her this much.

_Probably because of the drugs,_ an inner voice commented, sounding far too much like Sylia for comfort.

_Shut up,_ she told it, hopping off her bike and climbing into the truck cab, where she began pulling up the carpeting and feeling around underneath it. _I've got enough of Sylia in my life right now without having her in my head as well._

_But that's not true, is it? You want Sylia to pay attention to you; the others, too. If they don't come when you call, you feel abandoned._

"Aha!" Priss felt her finger brush the thing she was looking for, and she pursued it further in. _And that's because I thought we were a team. I thought we stood by each other. I guess I was wrong._

_But you still want Sylia,_ the voice insisted.

Another inch, and she had the spare key to the trailer in her grasp. She retrieved it with a feeling of triumph. _Sylia can go to hell._

The trailer door swung open, engulfing her in welcoming darkness. As she took off her helmet she could taste the air, slightly stale after a night or two away from home, but something about it was comforting. Some people might have called her living conditions squalid, but she preferred to think of them as lived-in. Besides, even if the truck itself was an outdated wreck, she kept the inside of the trailer pretty clean, at least usually. She supposed she had let it go a little lately. Possibly she should throw out some of the beer cans that had been accumulating in the corner. But right now, she had other things to do.

She stripped off the rest of the hardsuit in short order, leaving it where it fell. Beneath her mattress, her hands sought, and found, a small tin of supplies: teaspoon, syringes, cotton swabs, and the star of the show, a zipper bag of white powder.

Her mouth dried up at the familiar sight, fear and desire warring with her in equal parts. From the second she'd awoken, the driving need in her mind had been to survive until this moment. Now, with it in her hands, the bitter reality of what she was doing set in. She looked around the trailer again, at the more-than-average mess she'd been living in, and suddenly felt very small.

_You don't have to do this,_ the voice in her mind said. _Call Sylia. Let her know what's going on._

_Sylia doesn't care about you,_ another part of her replied. _Give your weakness to her and she'll only exploit it, then throw you away like she did before._

_Shut up!_ She clutched at the tin, weary of the battle in her head. _I don't care! I just want this all to stop..._

A bottle of water lay on the bed; days old now, but she didn't care. Getting up to get more would mean she had to think about her body, about the world beyond this bed. Hands shaking, she measured out the powder into the spoon, then water. The steps were second nature to her now: stir it with the cotton, to filter out the worst of the street junk. Tug a leather belt tight around the upper arm, a tourniquet. Fill the syringe. Take a deep breath, prepare to violate the age-old contract between body and mind: _we won't hurt each other._ Let the bitterness ferment in your mouth as you recall all the times your body didn't hold up its end of the promise. _This one's for you, bitch._ Stab. Watch the blood backwash in the syringe, the vein's last breath of protest.

Wait to fall.

The rush came on in seconds, and she flopped back into her bed, warm, dizzy, numb. The voices in her head were quiet at last. She smiled, allowing herself to forget, for a moment, that they had ever existed at all.


	4. (Sylia) Cold Call

The first thing Sylia did when she awoke was check on Priss. She was chagrined, but not wholly surprised, to find her gone.

_I should've locked her in one of the guest rooms._ Not that a lock would keep Priss in, if she wanted out.

She checked the closet next. Priss' bag was still there, with the keys inside. A quick tour of the rest of the apartment turned up nothing missing or out of place, and she was about to allow herself the thought that Priss might just be in the bathroom when her phone beeped. It was Mackie.

`Priss' hardsuit is missing`, read the message. Sylia bit back a curse.

`Put a track out on it.`, she sent back. `I'm going after her.`

***

Sylia opened the door to Priss' trailer, and was immediately assaulted by the smell of sickness: stale sweat, dried blood and apathy. The nature of the dwelling had nothing to do with it: it wasn't the most upscale of homes, but Priss had always kept it clean, if not neat. She also usually kept it air-conditioned, but either the generator had gone down or she didn't care right now. As Sylia closed the door behind her and let her vision adjust, a third explanation arose. Lying amid the assorted trash on her bed, bloody bandages and needle caps, Priss looked to be in the throes of a fever.

"I'm sorry for what I said before," she said. There was no answer, and she stepped closer to Priss' bunk. "Can I come up?"

"Do what you want," was the muffled response.

The ladder creaked slightly as Sylia made her way up it. Pushing aside some trash to give herself room, she half-sat, half-lay beside Priss, who regarded her with hollow eyes.

"Is this how you're going to go out?" asked Sylia quietly. "Is chasing that dragon worth this?"

A flicker of fire crept back into Priss' expression, though her words were slurred. "Is that what you think this is all about? That I'm after some fucking high?"

"I have no idea what this is about," said Sylia. "I wish you'd tell me."

Priss made a fist, her face shining with anger and heat. "I just want to forget! I just want everything to shut up for one-- goddamn-- moment!" She waved her arms around wildly. "I can ride, I can sing, but I can't do those things twenty-four-seven, and you t-took--" Her composure crumbled, and with a half-snarl, half-sob, she struck out at Sylia. "--the only other thing that helped away from me!"

Sylia touched her hand to her cheek, and felt a sting of pain, her fingers coming away wet. Priss had had something in her hand when she'd hit her. Priss seemed to notice at about the same time, and looked down at the syringe caught in her grip, mouth agape. "I--"

Sylia silenced her with a hand. "Don't worry about it. I've seen worse. But Priss," she said, speaking slowly and softly in hopes of reaching the girl's troubled mind. "What you said hardly adds up. You didn't turn to drugs because I took the Knight Sabers away from you. I took the Knight Sabers away from you because you turned to drugs."

"That's not what you took away from me," said Priss, almost too softly to be heard.

"Then what?"

Priss shook her head. "You don't get to say you're sorry, Sylia. Not when you don't know what you're sorry for."

Just then, Sylia's comm link vibrated. She turned around at the sound of a chime to see Priss' hardsuit blink into action, too. She opened the line. "Mackie, what is it?"

"Boomers-- headed for your location. I've scrambled the rest of the team."

"What? Why would they be headed here?" _And why right now?_ Priss was pushing past her, descending the ladder. "--wait, you can't--"

"I don't know," said Mackie, "but you'd better get ready. They're coming in fast. I'm sending Linna and Nene with your suit, but if they don't get there in time..."

"Priss can't fight!" But she was already climbing into the hardsuit, adjusting the fit with trembling hands. "Absolutely not! Put that down-- that's an order!"

Priss shot her a grim smirk. "I don't take orders from you any more, remember?" She finished suiting up the rest of the way. "Besides, this is my fight."

"What are you talking about, 'your fight'?" Off in the distance, the low growls of combat Boomers could be heard. Sylia tensed. If the battle came to them before her suit did...

"The Boomers. They know what I did to Sylvie." Priss flexed her fingers. "They're tracking me somehow-- I haven't figured it out, but--" 

"Priss." Sylia wanted to grab her by the shoulders, but with Priss in the hardsuit and her out of one, that was suddenly a risk she didn't want to take. She settled for fixing her eyes on Priss' wild, darting ones, as if she could hold her steady with that stare. "Listen to me. No one is hunting you. No one is tracking you. You're--"

" _Then what is that?_ " Priss screamed, jabbing her finger in the direction of the sound.

"--Priss, listen--"

With the screech of warped metal, the floor was ripped from underneath them, buckling like a crushed soda can as they were flung backwards into the wall-- which was now their floor. Sylia thanked the gods Priss' bike wasn't still in the trailer as half its contents crashed down on their heads, beer cans and leather boots bouncing off Priss' hardsuit, Sylia flinging up her arms as poor protection from the debris that showered her face. A knife clanged on the floor-- wall-- next to her head and a rapid-fire series of thoughts ran through her brain: _Priss still keeps knives in her bed?; You're one to talk-- you gave her much worse weapons on purpose.; Yes, but there's something thuggish about a knife.; And Priss isn't a thug by what metric?_

Their world began to lurch violently from side to side, again with that awful grating sound. _The fact that I hired her,_ Sylia kept up mentally, rolling to the side to avoid the fist that, moments later, tore through the thin metal of the trailer and would have taken off her head. _The Knight Sabers fight for peace. We're not vigilantes._ The hole made by the fist grew larger, and the rest of the Boomer followed. _Tell that to Priss,_ the voice in her head replied. _Isn't it just that you'd rather think she's that way because you are? Doesn't it sting that you can't make the real Priss fit your standards?_

One thing Sylia sometimes hated about her mind: the internal self-critique never did shut up.

She blocked the Boomer's next strike with what remained of Priss' ladder, a weak blow that would only fend off the machine for a moment. If Priss was on her game, this would be buying time until her teammate rushed in and punched the thing in the braincase, but Sylia knew she couldn't count on that now. And yet it was instinct, the way they moved as a team-- and somehow it panned out, as the Boomer suddenly changed its tactic, whirling on the woman in the hardsuit who'd just shot it point blank.

Having got its attention, Priss did a quick backwards hop through the hole in the wall, and the Boomer lurched after her, growling. Through the hole, she could make out several of its friends converging on Priss, whose answer was to hop on a bike and speed off, the Boomers trailing in her wake.

_They're following her,_ Sylia thought, still sprawled on her back, taking in the whole tableau. _Was she right...?_ A moment later, and she shook the thought off. As much as she wanted to understand Priss, getting caught up in her delusions was not the way to go. If the Boomers were after the Knight Sabers, they probably hadn't recognised Sylia without her suit.

_Speaking of that, I hope the others get here soon._ She coughed, a little winded, and pushed herself up off the floor... wall. There was the sound of something tearing, and she looked down. The remains of a concert poster were tacked to the ground beneath her.

She stepped off the poster, memories flooding back of the time it had been torn. A rush of sorrow welled up in her chest. _Priss... you can't run from your problems forever. They're going to catch up, and when they find you, I'm afraid they'll kill you._

_Nice advice,_ the inner critic piped up, reliable as ever. _Maybe you could take it some time yourself._

There was an extended squeal of tires from outside, followed by a crunch, and relief mixed with chagrin washed over Sylia. _Can't anyone other than me learn to drive without destroying things?_ She stepped out through the hole, since the door was now on its side, and raised a hand to the driver of the truck. A suited-up Linna waved back. _Figures._

The others hopped out of the truck and rushed towards Sylia. "Are you okay?" asked Linna, her voice tinny and vague through the comm link.

"I'm fine," she said, and despite the briefly alarming situation, it was true. Her jacket was covered in dust and possibly a few less legal substances, and her back ached slightly from the fall, but she'd taken no real damage.

"Where are the Boomers?" said Nene, shifting into combat stance and looking around at the shambles that was Priss' trailer. "Where's Priss?"

Sylia pointed down the street to where she'd seen her sometime teammate vanish into the distance. "She led them off. I'm guessing she was headed for the expressway."

"By herself?" asked Linna.

Nene made a gesture of helplessness. "I guess I really can't pretend to be surprised. So are we going after her?"

Sylia had already taken the driver's seat. "Get in."


	5. (Priss) Hell Road

Priss hit the highway at 220 kmh, a nice, lazy speed for shaking off Boomers. They flared their rear jets, trying to claw closer, but they weren't specialised for high-speed pursuit, whereas the bike beneath her was built for just that. _Not bad for a lifted ride,_ she thought. _I'll have to look into the model._

She could push it further, but she needed to give the Boomers at least the illusion of a chance. If they lost her scent, they might double back and start going after the other Sabers. She took the time to throw in some fancy weaves around a blown-out tire, thrilling to the way the bike responded to her slightest move. Lowering her profile, she became part of the smooth, sleek line of the machine, not wanting to hinder it in its gallop across the asphalt. Her demons, literal and figurative, struggled to keep up, and her mind felt clear again. This, for the brief stretches she could manage it, was peace.

She knew she was drawing out this chase; they were more than far enough away from the others now. There was no reason not to just turn around and beat the Boomers down. But ending the fight meant going back to Sylia, meant facing her and the others again, meant a totaled trailer and nowhere to sleep, unless she wanted to turn in the hardsuit and spend another night under Sylia's scrutiny. Moreover, it meant boredom, and boredom made the urge for another hit scream that much louder-- and after another ruined performance at Hot Legs, she was fast running out of money. She was strong from her time in the Knight Sabers and on the streets, too strong, and the reality was she would exhaust her finances long before the drugs exhausted her body-- and when that day came, there would be nowhere to run. It was easier to just keep riding, to play the long game, to block out the memories of the burned-out life she was leaving behind. The truth would always dog her, but first it would have to beat her. And Priss Asagiri rode hard.

 _What would happen if I didn't stop?_ she asked herself. The Boomers really weren't anything special; she'd mostly just drawn them off because she felt guilty, guilty that she'd put Sylia in danger. Nene and Linna would be there by now, and between the three of them, they could easily take the Boomers down even if they did turn back. ...Or she could exhaust their fuel supplies first, she thought, the flickering glow of the Boomers' jets beginning to pale in her side mirror. Her pursuers rapidly shrank to dots, and she felt a brief flush of triumph as she finally revved the bike into higher gear. The Boomers wouldn't risk heading back now, unless they had a death wish. And for the moment, she was free.

 _Free to go where?_ \-- it didn't matter. All that mattered was that there was nothing left behind her, and so she might as well keep going ahead. There was nothing ahead of her, either, but as long as she was riding, she could put off that thought for a little while longer. Maybe she'd go lift the wallets off some street toughs, like back in the good old days. Maybe there were still some gangs out there who'd have her. If they'd been willing to have her as a scruffy, barely-teenage orphan who wouldn't have known a roundhouse kick if she'd taken one to the face, they could find room for a former Knight Saber with junked-up veins and a megacorporation's creations gone wild seeking her out for a personal vendetta. Maybe. And if there weren't, there was always riding until her heart collapsed, pushing and pushing until that gap between _out of money_ and _out of life_ finally squeezed shut. Better to die on a bike than-- well, almost anywhere else at all.

But that moment hadn't come yet. Right now, it was just the two of them and the road, and they had time.

Priss held the bike close, letting its responses reverberate through her chest. Just as Nene could diagnose almost any computer problem by listening to the whirrs and clicks of the system, Priss could hear this bike's pain in its voice. The engine ground and growled more than it should whenever she gassed it, and there was a slight knocking sound deep in the bowels of the beast, a jumpy, erratic pulse that only seemed to grow louder as they rode on. _Someone hasn't been treating you too well, huh,_ she thought. _Sure know that feeling. But it's okay now. We've got each other, and I'll take good care of you._

The bike almost seemed to purr in response. She leaned down, giving the tank a little pat, and was surprised to feel something grasp back.

"Hey!" She tried to yank her hand back, but its grip was vice-tight, pinching her fingers even through the suit. Abruptly the bike swerved to the left, and she realised something was wrapped around her leg, pulling her off-balance. She dared a glance and found her fears confirmed: thick tendrils, like metallic ropes, were bursting forth from the machine, and reaching for her.

 _A Boomer...? No way! It's not possible..._ Shock turned to an awful, grinding horror as she felt its coils slowly creep up her leg, the horror of yet another of life's certainties brought crashing down. Bikes were friends; Boomers were enemies. It was that simple, and even if the latter hadn't quite held true since Sylvie, discarding the former meant an end to one more of her precious few escapes. On a bike, nothing could truly touch her, nothing that went more than skin deep. The demons didn't reach her here; she could breathe. But now her chest was tightening again, and the world was a nauseating mess of colour, a blurred riot hiding all the faces she ached to forget. _No... you can't have this. Please. You can't have me here, not here, not like this..._

Vision snapped back into place, and her head whipped around to see a car barreling down on her, its driver looking as horrified as she felt. "Shit!" Without her noticing, the bike had dragged her into the opposing lane of traffic. She wrenched on the controls as hard as she could with her one free hand, using her trapped arm as leverage against the Boomer. The bike veered back into the right lane, just in time for the car to slam violently into a roadside barrier, narrowly missing her. 

With her free leg she kicked at a tendril, but her heel only bounced off it with a dull clang. Meanwhile, two others crept in from the sides and encircled her waist, limiting her struggles. More tendrils surged forth and pinned her legs, then her arms, a writhing mass of chrome-plated vines cocooning her from the world: the only sounds left were her own breaths, echoing noisily off the insides of her helmet, and the engine's vibrant hum.

And then she felt it. The thing she'd been frightened of since the beginning, when they'd realised Boomers could assimilate other machines. She'd always wondered if the hardsuits were among the things they could digest, and now, feeling a cold touch on the back of her neck, she knew the answer. She growled low in her throat, bucking and shaking her head violently as if she could throw the creature off, desperate to pluck the thing and dash it against the nearest hard surface. _My hardsuit, too. Everything I relied on... how fucking poetic._ Warning lights flashed across her heads-up display; she could feel the suit losing its responsiveness. If she didn't act soon, she'd be trapped inside. _I see your sick little game, universe. And I'm gonna play it to the end._

"You've gone too far, you piece of shit," she snarled, coating the inside of her visor with spittle and froth. "This stops here!" No longer concerned for whether they ran off the road, she flung all her weight to the right as hard as she could, slamming the fused hardsuit-and-bike into the crash barrier. More warnings blared from inside the suit, but she ignored them: she'd put hardsuits through worse before. Pain lanced through her side and made her grit her teeth, but she pushed past it, bringing her surroundings into focus.

The Boomer, physically at least, had gone quiet, its coils neither withdrawing nor making any motion to advance. Inside the mutant mass of metal, it was dark, which she'd expected, and cold, which she hadn't; the bike's engine should at least have been hot, but she felt like she'd just been plunged into ice water. _So this is death, huh,_ she thought detachedly. _I always heard death was cold. At least maybe this means I'm not going to hell... hah. Who am I kidding._

She'd flirted with death enough times to know its touch, however, and something was off. This wasn't the cold of a body losing consciousness, the expanding dark she'd felt more than once after too heavy a dose, lying on the floor of her trailer as the stimulants squeezed her heart. This was a live thing, coursing its way through her bloodstream in a slow, steady slither, and she fought the urge to vomit as it hit her that, somehow, the Boomer was inside Priss herself.

Her mind, having all but tuned out, kicked back into gear. _How can a Boomer...? No! This doesn't make sense! I'm not a machine! I'm not a machine!_ But the monster didn't listen. In her mind's eye, she knew what she would see if she looked under the suit: millions of nanomachines breeding under her skin, an ever-advancing crawl that made her yearn to dig her nails into her flesh, rip the invaders out of her. She tried to twist her limbs free, to no avail; the coils were too tight, and in some places they'd actually crushed the metal of the suit, making it impossible to work free no matter how long she tried. If she could get out of the suit, however...

She pushed the release valve, and heard the familiar hiss of the suit depressurizing. Instantly, her skin was on fire. She looked down at her arm, the suit split in two around it, and to her horror saw countless thin, silvery tendrils running from the hardsuit to her. Panic fueling her strength, she braced herself for pain as she ripped her arm from the hardsuit, tearing out the filaments. Or at least, she tried to. Her arm was out, but when she looked back at it, the metallic threads were still there, embedded in her flesh: they were just longer now, thin gashes running down her arm where they'd sliced through the skin like cheese wire. _A puppet,_ she thought, suddenly numb to the sight. She wondered how much more of this she could take before her mind shut down completely. _I look like a puppet dangling on its strings._

 _\--No._ She wouldn't be a puppet, to a Boomer or anything else. "Help me!" she yelled into the helmet, her ears ringing too hard for her to hear the subtle hiss that would tell her the frequency was online. "Sylia! Mackie! Anyone!"

Sylia's voice came on, and an immediate wave of calm broke over her mind. "Priss! Where are you?"

"The bike-- turned on me. The bike was a Boomer, and now it's in, it's in my hardsuit, it's everywhere! --Sylia, I know what you're thinking, but I swear I'm not making this up, goddamnit! I ran some guy off the road trying to break out-- I can still see the smoke from the wreck back there! You gotta get over here!"

She could hear Sylia dialing up the police frequencies. "--accident on the Shuto Expressway just south of downtown-- is that you?"

"Yes-- haaaaggh!" A jolt of static shot through the filaments. Their chrome surfaces began to ripple and warp. "Shit, this bastard's waking up again! Hurry!"

There was another burst of static, louder this time. Had it come from the comm link? "Sylia? You still there? Answer me, dammit!" The static exploded inside her brain, and she tried to clutch at her head, succeeding in ripping her other arm out of the suit and banging it uselessly against her helmet. "Shut up, shut up, _shut up!_ " she roared, very nearly tearing the helmet from her head in a rage but remembering, at the last possible moment, the cheese-wire lines on her arms. If she ripped off the helmet, she might rip her face off, too. At this moment, the thought was still tempting.

The static was shaping itself into a voice, its buzzing bass undertones grating on her eardrums. _`They're coming now.`_

"Get out of my head!" Priss pounded on her helmet again.

_` They're coming for you. Is that what you want? Scrape you up off the streets, stitch your broken heart back together again. They're going to pick you up and make you owe them, make you need them. They're inside your body like all my little wires. Keeping you alive. Feeding on you.` _

"--shut up!"

_` Come with me. Take me home. Don't leave me. Is that what you want to hear them say? But no one's coming for you, Priss. No one's here. Don't you notice that it's been a long time now? It's been hours and hours.` _

"You're lying!" Fuck, she had to get this thing out of her mind. Perhaps a shock-- a static pulse--

The voice changed, harsh and robotic melting away into husky, female tones. _Priss. It's Sylia. Don't you know what time it is?_

"Sylia...?"

_You shouldn't be calling this late. Go back to sleep, Priss. Go back to sleep._

"Sylia, there's trouble--"

Sylia's voice chided her, almost sweetly. _How very like you. When trouble comes around, there you are in the middle of it. But there's no one coming to save you this time. The world doesn't revolve around you, you know._

"I need help--"

_No one's coming for you, Priss. It's been years and years. Don't you remember? Everyone you loved died in the earthquake._

"That's not--" _How it is now,_ she was going to say, until she realised that, for all intents and purposes, it was. Everyone she'd ever cared about was either dead because of her or had left her once she'd worn out her welcome. She was alone. She had always been alone.

With a primal scream of rage she slammed the Boomer against the barrier, again and again. Droplets of warm blood misted her skin, spurting from her in arcs as she flung around bits of the hardsuit, the wires cutting through her flesh. She felt like she was being carved up from the inside, a piece of meat, a puppet, a monster, and no matter what she did she couldn't get them _out_ \--

She threw herself against the metal mess one more time, and the filaments hummed and began to retract, like they were on spools. "No!" she cried, but the hardsuit-- and the Boomer-- slammed back into place around her, the suit's edges fusing together again. _A meat locker made for one._ Blood spattered her vision through the visor; she coughed and there was more, her lungs ablaze with something that felt feverish and wrong.

A small voice in her head, not Sylia or the Boomer, said _You could give up. Lie down and be done with this. It's long past time for Priss Asagiri to die._ Fundamentally, she agreed with it. But even bleeding out onto asphalt, with her mind shrieking at her that she was alone, she couldn't keep from fighting this thing that wanted her life. If she was going to go down, at the very least, it would go down with her.

The hardsuit was past ruined, little more than a skeleton for the parasite, but there was one thing it might just still do. As a last resort, Sylia had built a mechanism into the suits that would allow them to selectively self-destruct. If a Saber's leg got pinned by a girder, they could force the suit to blow off the limb, giving them a chance to escape. _Like lizards,_ Sylia had explained. _They can detach their own tails to survive._

Of course, the chances of surviving weren't that hot. But the wires did seem to be confined to her arms. Maybe if she could sever those connections-- she didn't want to think the words _sever her own limbs_ \-- she could get this thing out of her. Even if she died, it would be out of her.

And she was probably going to die. But if she stayed here, she'd die anyway.

"Sylia," she spoke into the comm link. Her voice sounded like broken glass, and blood trickled from her mouth when she moved it. "You'd better-- I don't even know if you're listening--" She paused, started over. "I-- I fucking hate you, you worthless piece of shit." Her voice cracked on the words, not like glass but like something less savage. "...no. That's not... I don't... never mind." She closed her eyes, choking back everything she could have said. None of it was worth putting into words. "Goodbye."

She sent the self-destruct command, and her world went up in flames.


	6. (Sylia) Flash Point

" _Priss!_ "

Inside the truck, all hearts stopped at the scream that tore itself from Sylia's throat. Sylia Stingray didn't scream, and if she had, it would never have sounded like this: an animal howl, a cracked and broken cry of loss. Even Sylia felt herself shrink at the sound of it, delayed in reaching her ears.

"This must be a nightmare," Nene whispered, huddling against Linna for comfort.

It wasn't.

The bike was a gutted tangle of metal, close to unrecognisable. Of the debris surrounding the wreck, the only indications that a person had been here were twin swaths of blood, thick dark arcs across the tarmac. Sylia leapt out of the vehicle and, touching her fingers to the blood to confirm it, followed one of the arcs to its terminus: a hardsuit arm, bright blue until it reached the shoulder, where it ended in blackened chrome. The shell of the hardsuit was split open along the seam, like it did whenever someone pulled the release mechanism, but the wearer had not fully vacated the premises. Through the split, she could see inside, past the blood-caked edges, to what was unmistakeably a human arm.

She knelt down and laid her hand atop the limb, her eyes falling closed. Her shoulders began to shake, subtly at first, then violently, in time to sharp, strangled sobs. In the back of her mind some part of her noted how Linna and Nene hid their faces in each other, and knew that, though they surely grieved for Priss, what they truly could not bring themselves to look upon was the sight of their leader in tears.

The part of her that was that leader felt only shame for inflicting this upon them. But there was another part of her, long dormant, that seemed to increasingly want to be heard; and that part would not let her stop.

Through the smoke of the wreckage, a shadow approached, unsteady, lurching. Nene readied her cannon, composed in an instant. "Boomer!" she cried, keeping her weapon trained on the figure, Linna following suit. But as the form came closer, both weapons and jaws dropped, and Sylia sprang forward to catch the staggering girl in her arms.

"Priss!" Nene ran over to the pair, but pulled up short and almost screamed as Sylia lifted the helmet from Priss' head, revealing a shock of blood-matted hair and a face that was practically a red mask. Sylia waved a scanner over the remains of the hardsuit, and turned to the other Sabers, fighting to pull her mask of composure back together.

"She's alive," she reassured them. "It... looks worse than it is."

"Worse than it is?" said Nene, her eyes wide with disbelief. "She-- she's missing both her arms! How is she still alive?"

"The hardsuits are designed to perform emergency life support functions if the self-destruct mechanisms are activated," said Sylia. "It's built into the very core of the design, and there are multiple levels of redundancy. Even if the suit is almost totally destroyed, it should still provide those functions to the best of its ability."

"Wait, Priss self-destructed her suit?" said Linna, stepping up. "But why?"

Sylia cursed herself for not having kept the others up-to-date on what she'd heard over the comm. The thought of retreading the whole matter again now-- the worsening nature of Priss' delusions, their increasingly self-directed manifestations, the things she'd said before she'd pulled the kill switch-- made her feel ill. She glanced back down the highway towards the more distant wreck of the two, now ringed by a swarm of flashing blue and red lights. "We'll talk later. The suit's stabilized her as much as it can, but she still needs treatment fast." She tilted her head towards the cops. "Looks like they've got the other one under control. Linna, help me get Priss. Nene, find where the rest of the hardsuit got to and gather it up."

"You mean-- where the rest of Priss got to, right?" said Nene, going pale and looking like she was about to throw up. "I can't just-- I mean--"

"We probably can't save her arms, but we can't just leave pieces of a hardsuit lying around for the USSD to find. Or anyone else, for that matter." Sylia's tone was firm, and with a deep intake of breath and what was clearly a deliberate effort not to vomit, Nene began to search through the wreckage.

They picked their way back to the truck with Priss in tow, in more pieces than any of them would have liked.

***

Sylia jerked awake at the sound of a voice. _A dream._ It had all been a dream, she thought, images of Priss' mangled body fading away to be replaced by the solidity of the world around her. She'd fallen asleep in the plastic chair--

 _In the hospital,_ she registered, her stomach renewing its churn. She hadn't dreamed it. But for a moment she'd dreamed she'd dreamed it, and realising the truth for the second time was somehow worse than it had been the first.

"...Sylia. Hey." The voice was slowly resolving itself into words, familiar tones.

"Mackie?" She sat up straight, pulled her head out of her hands to look at him. Beside her, Linna whimpered, as if likewise pulling herself out of sleep. "How's Priss?"

"Alive." Sylia let out the breath she'd been holding. "Still under sedation, though she should be coming round soon, if past history's anything to go by."

Mackie smiled wryly, and she nodded: she'd seen Priss shake off doses that would have killed a horse. Something in Sylia fought them too, as it happened, and she couldn't help thinking it stemmed from the same source: a fear of losing control, of being made vulnerable in a way you couldn't snap out of. _We're not so different, Priss, you and I._

"Good. I'll be there when she wakes up." She turned to the other Sabers before either of them could launch a protest. "With what she's been through, I think it's best if we go in one at a time." It was good practice, though of course it was hardly the real reason. She had things she wanted to talk to Priss about alone.

Linna nodded reluctantly, while Nene fidgeted with the corner of a pamphlet on the care of early-onset diabetes, evidently zoned out. She turned back to Mackie. "What's the ETA on getting her back up and fully functional?"

A frown crossed Mackie's face. "Right now, we don't know."

Her heart rate began to pick up again. "Why not? Did something go wrong with the cell cloning?"

"Yes and no. Simply put, just growing her new arms from a cell culture might still be possible, but it might not be the best solution. I think we're going to have to give her cyber prosthetics."

She shook her head. "She'd hate that."

"That's not the only thing she'll hate," said Mackie ruefully. "There was-- an implant found in Priss' body."

Sylia grimaced. "A nanotech implant? But Priss would never--" 

"It was in her side. Right where her scar is, where Anri..."

"...stabbed her." She let out a lengthy exhale. It made too much sense. She wished it didn't. "And let me guess. This implant has some kind of tracking function built in."

"Right."

"So she really is being hunted." Sylia pushed back her hair with her fingers. There was something here that still didn't quite add up. "But the time at the club-- there were no signs of a break-in."

"With the amount of narcotics she's been putting into herself, it's entirely possible she's hallucinating on top of this," said Mackie, his voice grim. "The problem is, it's going to be hard to tell the difference."

"What do you mean?"

"It's not just one implant. There's a whole network of nanofibers running through her system. At the rate it's advancing, she's got about three months before she qualifies as a Boomeroid." 

This time, everyone spoke up in unison, even Nene. "What?"

Mackie gave a short, severe nod. "That's got to be why she triggered the self-destruct-- she had to know she was being invaded and thought she could purge the nanosystem that way. But it's probably already been spreading through her body for quite some time."

Something like a mix of horror and relief flooded through her system. To know that Priss had possibly had more than suicidal reasons for the actions she'd taken-- it didn't exactly erase her concerns about Priss' mental state, but it was something. Yet the fact that this parasite had been inside her all along, and they hadn't done a thing to stop it... _Because I didn't believe her. Because I couldn't believe her._

_And we still don't know how much we can believe her,_ the rational part of her added. She knew her judgment had been fair: Priss' accounts of her experiences were still likely to be unreliable, by any measure. It just didn't make her feel any less responsible for the parts that had been true.

"What do you mean by advancing?" she pressed. "Couldn't they remove it?"

"That's the other problem. With the degree it's integrated itself into her body, it's going to be hard to remove it without killing her as well." Mackie pulled up a set of technical analyses on his tablet and handed it to Sylia. "I think it can be done, but it's going to require a population of friendly nanos to slowly take over and deconstruct the system that's built up. Right now, the best way I can think of to do that is to attach another implant to her that's big enough and self-sustaining enough to fuel a colony of nanos that can take out the others. Hence, artificial limbs. The alternative would be something so large it'd restrict her movement, and she'd hate that even more... this is a battle she could be fighting for years." He paused, his voice turning uneasy. "You're not gonna want to hear this, sis, but if we could have caught it sooner..."

"Please, don't remind me." It was said as casually as she could manage, but the look she gave Mackie must have been raw: he immediately shrank back. "So you think-- this Boomer subsystem--"

"--Could be responsible for controlling the machinery around her and using it against her. Yes," said Mackie. "If she was on her own, it'd be functionally impossible to tell from a hallucination, whether from the drugs or from"-- he winced, reluctant to say the words --"Boomer Syndrome. Which, as I'm sure you can guess, her fragile mental state right now makes her a high-risk candidate for... if she doesn't have it already."

Sylia weighed up everything she'd been given, let it all trickle down into her conscious mind. Priss as a Boomeroid... with cybernetic implants... with a body that could and would turn on her. If the mental state of the Priss who'd gone into this had been shaky, the one who came out might be unsalvageable.

 _If I'd listened... if we'd caught it sooner..._ But self-recrimination wouldn't solve anything. It was just another way to run.

 _What could have been is irrelevant,_ she told herself. _What she needs is for me to be there for her now._

She just hoped she could follow through this time.

***

Sylia could hardly blame Priss for fighting the sedation. Lying there, pale and drawn, her entire torso bundled in gauze, she looked as small and lost as Sylia imagined a woman of her stature could. The two missing limbs probably had something to do with it, she realised with renewed shock. With a sheet draped over her torso and dressings padding out her shape, it was hard to tell at first glance how thoroughly she'd been maimed, but a closer look betrayed the truth. From the shoulders down, where arms should have been, there was empty space that, once noticed, screamed its loss.

A tiny moan escaped Priss, and her heart flinched. _Give me the strength to say what I need to say,_ she pleaded silently, then thought better of it. _No. Give her the strength to hear it._

The covers stirred, slowly, a weak and fluttering pulse translated into full-body motion. Time trickled on; for a while it seemed like Priss had fallen back asleep, and Sylia tried willing her nerves to calm. It worked, until she heard Priss suddenly speak.

"...Am I dead?" she said, in a voice like a bike skidding on gravel.

"No, you're quite alive. Though still rather the worse for wear. How do you feel?"

"Awful. Like a truck ran me over."

She coughed a little, and Sylia stood up. "Do you want some water?"

Priss nodded. Sylia stepped out to find a water cooler, and returned with a small paper cup. As she brought it over to Priss, she saw her shift as if trying to sit up, then, with eyes wide and a grunt of confusion, look to the empty space on first one side of her body, then the other.

"I'm afraid I'll have to hold it for you," said Sylia, pressing the cup to Priss' lips and allowing her to take a drink, which she did, eagerly. "That was a brave thing you did back there. You're a good Knight Saber, Priss."

Priss made a dry sound that could have been a laugh. "Not a Knight Saber any more, remember?"

"No." She set the cup down on the nightstand. "You're wrong. I... I was wrong, to do what I did. That was part of why I wanted to be the one here when you woke up. I wanted to apologise."

When she met Priss' eyes again, there was a strange look in them, a dawning recognition. She watched them flick from side to side as Priss reconstructed the full picture of what had happened. When she spoke, her voice was tiny. "You... came for me."

"Of course. Did you think I was going to leave you for roadkill?"

Priss changed the subject. "Where are the others?"

"Waiting outside. Nene... hasn't said much since she saw you like that." _Did I fail her, too? Somebody had to do it, but..._ "But physically, they're both unharmed. Mackie's sure to be keeping them up to date on your condition."

Priss nodded, lowering her eyes. "Sucks to be Nene, huh. Poor kid. I must've looked a real mess out there." She shifted her shoulders again, looking desperately like she wanted to fidget with something. "I really didn't think you were coming."

She knew what Priss was implying, and she knew she wouldn't get anywhere unless she said it out loud. "You thought I abandoned you. I know. You... had a right to think it. But you have to know I wouldn't really let you die."

Her voice was bitter. "Really? 'Cause from where I'm standing it looks like you're making a habit of it. Help you sleep better at night, would it, if you could blame it on a Boomer? Why don't you just finish me off yourself? Put a bullet through my skull, if that's what you want. It's not like there's anyone who'd miss me."

"Priss, that's not true--"

"Like hell it isn't!" Priss tried to sit up further and failed, but even helpless like this, the fires still danced in her eyes. Somehow, after all those hollow-eyed stares, just seeing a hint of the old Priss back made Sylia want to crow in triumph. "What are we to you, Sylia? What am _I_? Just the latest-- disposable plaything in your little game? I mean, what, is this your fetish or something? Pick up some kid down on her luck, no parents, dropped off the radar, then make her trust you--"

"No!"

Priss slumped back against her pillows, letting out a huff. "Then you sure got a funny way of showing it."

"I-- I know. I see that now. I just-- you know it isn't necessarily... my forte, understanding people's hearts." She brushed a hair from her face, unable to recall when she'd last felt this awkward. _Never admit a weakness_ : that had been drilled into them both early, it seemed. But if she didn't do this, she'd never get through to her. Not that that made it feel simpler. "Listen. I want you to know-- if you want, you have your old job back. But if you don't... you're free to walk away, too." A hand reached up to smooth down the lapel of her jacket. "I know I did wrong by you, all of you. I took your lives away from you. I wielded you like weapons for my own selfish ends... and especially you, Priss." A pressure inside her was building, and it forced the next words out without her consent. "You were the one weapon I couldn't do without."

She braced for an explosion, a blast of vitriol from Priss about how she was just using her. But instead, the bed shifted, and she felt Priss inch closer. "Then... why'd you let me go?" Even... before that, after Sylvie died, you just started treating me like-- like I wasn't even there any more."

"You left first." There was a laugh, bitter and brittle and dangerously close to cracking. "It was... stupid. You threatened to leave, and I-- there was no way I was going to let you have control over that. If you were going to leave my life, it was going to be on my terms."

She could tell this rare display of emotion made Priss uneasy. It was making her uneasy, too. Something volatile was about to spark, and a part of her wanted to run from it; moreso when Priss' own voice cracked as she spoke. "I wasn't really going to leave. You know that." But something else, some strange impulse, made her want to grip the flame even as it burned. "I was just-- I was in pain, Sylia, I was _grieving_ \--"

She seized the flame. "Over her."

"Yes, over her. What, is that somewhere in the fine print I missed?" She put on a voice that was clearly meant as a mockery of Sylia. "Rule twelve of the Knight Sabers, 'thou shalt not grieve over someone you murdered'?"

"You barely knew her! You compromised the entire team-- you compromised _me_ \--"

"For someone I loved!"

Sylia's arm jerked back, then froze when she realised she'd been about to slap a wounded teammate in her hospital bed-- and one who couldn't fight back, at that. Slowly, she brought her hand back in front of her face, watching it tremble. _What's happening to me?_ "...I'm sorry."

Priss scrutinised her. "Since when did you decide to hop on the crazy train, anyway? Thought that was my job."

"Meeting you might have had something to do with it."

"No, seriously."

"I'm not-- joking." She would not cry. She would not cry. "Please... believe me, Priss. This isn't a joke, or a game, it wasn't something I ever planned, but..." Her voice really did break then, and she watched the look on Priss' face shift from confusion, to comprehension, to some kind of mounting dread. Her face crumpled as if deflated from within, and her body looked like it wanted to do the same-- like she would have buried her face in her hands and curled up small, if only she could have.

"...no. No. Please, no! This can't-- you are _not_ going to pull that shit on me, Sylia. You abandoned me! Don't even try to say you--"

She laid her hand on Priss' back, touching her shoulder seeming like an unwise option. "Let's be fair about this. We abandoned each other. And we saved each other just as many times." Her own throat felt like it was drying up, and she felt a sudden urge to drink some of that water. "I could have done better by you. So, so much better, and I'm sorry, I truly am. But I'm willing to keep trying, if you're willing to try with me."

But Priss couldn't bring herself to look up. "Don't say it," she pleaded, doing her best to squirm back under her covers. To an outsider, she might have looked like a mortified teenager-- not that that was so far from the truth on its own-- but Sylia knew she was running from something far crueller than embarrassment. "You're not allowed to love me. You're just gonna leave like they all did. I can't trust you. You can't..."

Without thinking, she leaned forward and encircled Priss in her arms, pulling her close against her chest. "Why not?"

"Everyone leaves! We lose everyone! Cynthia, Irene, Sylvie... is there anyone we've actually saved? Actually helped?" She hid her face in Sylia's shoulder, her tears coming fast and heavy enough to soak through her jacket to her blouse. "What's the point to trying to make a home anyplace? Everything I touch turns to shit! Everything's falling apart around me and there's no _point_ to it any more!"

 _...There goes the right time to tell her she's infested with nanomachines,_ Sylia thought, rubbing circles on Priss' back as she sobbed. For a time, they just sat there, until eventually Sylia decided to break the silence. "Is that really what you believe?"

"What else am I supposed to believe?" Priss moaned. "It's true, isn't it? If I get involved with you, something terrible'll just happen to tear us apart like it did with everyone else. What's the point?"

"That's-- true of everything. Everyone dies. Things change. But for right now, we're here." Sylia pulled back enough that she could see Priss' face, and brushed her cheek with a finger. "Right now, we're here, and you can choose to either give up, or stay around for a little while." Her voice shifted businesslike in a flash. "Which is it? Because I can make a little phone call and have you put on suicide watch right now, if that's what we're dealing with. Arms or no arms."

"I'm not gonna kill myself," said Priss hoarsely.

"Good. Then, for as long as you stay here... let me stay here with you. If you want."

Priss swallowed, and Sylia could tell that at last, she'd said what she'd needed to hear. "I want."


	7. (Priss) Meat Heart

Priss woke with the niggling feeling that there was something she was forgetting. Of course, she'd lost a lot-- the obvious not withstanding, she was now out a home, and her possessions had probably long since been picked over by looters and fans-- but it wasn't that. It was as if there was something her mind had been clinging to, and somewhere in the chaos, it had slipped.

When she realised what it was, she almost laughed out loud. It was something she'd been carrying with her so long that its vanishing really did feel surreal: the conviction that she had no future. _It's absurd, really. I've got no home, no money, and my body's ruined. I can't go on stage, ride a bike-- hell, I couldn't even put a bullet through my head if I wanted to. And yet, just because she's with me, I feel like there's hope._ She did manage a huff of laughter, at that. _Stupid. One way or another, I'm just gonna get fucked over again. Yet I can't stop believing._

There was the sound of covers shifting across the room, and she looked over to see Sylia rise up from the neighbouring cot with a stretch and a yawn. "...nnh. How is it that you manage to wake up before me in the hospital, but when you're perfectly healthy wild horses can't drag you out of bed when I need you?"

"Probably had something to do with the fact that I slept half the day yesterday." She watched Sylia sit up and begin to brush her hair, and found herself envying that simple action. _My own hair must look like hell._ She shook her head from side to side, as if that could fix the problem, but only found herself with hair in her face and a vague feeling of frustration.

Sylia looked over at her and suppressed a chuckle. "You look like a poodle."

"Yeah, well, you look like a jackass who enjoys kicking people when they're down," she grouched. "'Sides, I'm in showbiz, the poodle look is in. But if you're so against it, you could come give me a hand."

It wasn't the nicest way to say it, but Sylia had taken worse from Priss, and her smile suggested she understood as she moved to sit down behind her, brush in hand. Asking for help with something so simple felt humbling, and Priss had been humbled enough lately. If she was honest with herself, there was something relieving about it, too, in having an excuse to rely on someone else; but the part of her that wanted it was at war with the part of her that knew that relying on anyone was pointless, and by the time the first strokes of the brush came, the slightest touch on her head was enough to make her tear up.

Sylia stopped at once. "What's wrong?" she asked. "Did I hurt you?"

"No..." She sniffled back tears. "I just feel pathetic." _In more ways than one._

Sylia reached around to cup her chin in her hand. "You're not pathetic." She kissed her jawline, then went back to brushing. "Just relax."

Priss tried her best, not that relaxing was her strong suit. If not for the circumstances, this really would be nice: Sylia pressed against her back in a satin housecoat, visibly modest yet doing little to keep their bodies apart. In fact, she could have sworn that Sylia must have loosened the damn thing somewhere along the line, because she kept feeling skin and the slight scratch of a lacy frill that certainly wasn't attached to anything she could see. Yet at the same time, it was a reminder of how the most trivial tasks in her life were things she could no longer accomplish without Sylia, and that didn't make her feel optimistic about the bigger things, either. Like ever riding again, or being a Knight Saber.

Sylia's offer, after all, was meaningless if she couldn't fight. She wasn't a computer whiz like Nene: she couldn't just learn to type with her toes and keep supporting from behind the scenes. Her skills were all combat-based, and she liked it that way. As much as she'd wanted to stress to Sylia that her formal suspension from the Knight Sabers wasn't what had been bothering her the most, she had to admit that without the opportunity for sanctioned conflict, she was more likely to get into the unsanctioned kind. And at the thought of life without either, she felt lost. Fighting had been a part of her existence since she was a child. She hadn't always relished that fact, but giving it up now would be like losing... well, a limb, she thought glumly. 

"Hey, Sylia." Now did seem like as good a time to bring it up as any. "So when are they gonna start patching me back together, anyway? A simple clone job should've been done by now." And as such, she wasn't stupid enough to think that there hadn't been complications. Sylia's reticence when it came to talking about her medical condition at all was proof of that. "It's not just gonna be a simple clone job, is it?" Now that the words were actually out, she felt panic ball in her stomach. "Goddamnit, Sylia, what are they gonna do to me?"

Sylia set the brush down on the bed. "You're going to need cybernetic implants."

"What? Why?" She tried to turn to look at Sylia, who was cleverly hiding in her blind spot. "Why can't I have my own arms back?"

"Because you're going to need a large repository of nanomachines attached to your body for the next several years, and short of hooking you up to a life support system--"

"Nanomachines." For a moment she thought she'd gone numb with rage, until she remembered that a significant percentage of her body was numb anyway. "What the hell for? --And you were going to tell me this when? When they were inside me?" The thought brought back the memory of that crawling sensation, of the Boomer letting loose its progeny under her skin. Abruptly, the reasoning behind Sylia's statement became evident. "...oh no. Oh no."

"I'm afraid the suspicions you had when you spoke to me over the comm... they were correct." She sighed. "I was trying to find a way to break it to you. When you went up against Largo and Anri-- you told me he put a knife into her hand. We believe that wasn't just a knife. It was the delivery mechanism for a colony of self-replicating nanomachines."

"--that've been tracking me!" The conclusion slammed into place like a coffin lid, suffocating and final.

"You weren't paranoid, Priss. I'm sorry."

She bowed her head, feeling naked without some way to hide her face, to withdraw from the world. Not that it mattered: their camera-eyes were already inside her, all through her, staring out of her skull.

"...fuck..." She stared at her pale, trembling knees, willing herself not to see blue burst through her skin, willing herself to see it just to kill the tension. "So-- let me get this straight. I'm up shit creek without a fucking paddle if we don't do this, and if we do, I'm still a Boomer, just hopefully a less violently rampaging one?"

Sylia made a barely-audible noise of confirmation.

"Fuck. Just... god fucking dammit all to hell!" She ground her teeth, trying to hold onto her anger. As long as she was angry, she told herself, she didn't have to cry. "This is just-- this is just great. I put my life into fighting the monster and this is what I get. Now I'm the monster. Now I'm the thing they wanna wipe off the face of the earth!" She shoved the hairbrush with her foot, sending it clattering to the floor, and drew her legs up close to her chest. The blood in her veins felt like ice. "...I've dreamed this. So many times. Since the first time I saw one up close, since that first fight, I've had nightmares about them holding me down, forcing me to become one of them... and now you're telling me it's all true? That this is how it ends-- me, going slowly insane as they turn me into a monster from the inside out? Until I'm not even me any more, just some meat jacket over a machine?"

"You mean like Sylvie?"

The comparison struck Priss like a punch to the gut, and she struggled to right it. "No! Sylvie was--"

"Different? How?"

 _How was Sylvie different? She wasn't a monster, a murderer, a Boomer on a rampage... except that she was. There really isn't anything that made her different from the ones we fight, except that..._ "I loved her."

"Mm. And what about me?"

Her eyes shot up, wide with apology. "I love you too!"

Sylia chuckled, a warm, deep sound that made her keenly aware of just how long it had been since she'd heard her laugh like that. Since she'd last seen her... happy. _It really did start after Sylvie, didn't it... I'm such an idiot. I was too caught up in my own grief to notice._ "I appreciate it, but that's not what I meant."

"Then what? You're not a Boom... er..." The word trailed from a slack jaw, and she stared at Sylia as if she could deduce the truth, as if there might be some visible tell that she'd somehow missed before. And the more she stared, the more it was obvious: the slightly blue tinge beneath Sylia's skin, the way it stretched unnaturally around her features as she opened her mouth to speak and her whole face sloughed off, the real Sylia clawing her way out from behind dead flesh, dead eyes, leering.

She let out an inarticulate cry of violence and kicked frantically at the sheets, trying to put as much distance between the Boomer and herself as she could while she figured out a plan. No hands or arms meant no grabbing a weapon, and she couldn't very well bite a Boomer to death. _If I can make it out to the hall-- get someone's attention..._

She pushed herself off the bed and tumbled to the floor, yelping in pain, scooting herself backwards with her feet until she was pressed up against the door-- _now to get it open..._ With athletic grace honed by years of combat, she rolled onto her back then levered herself up onto her shoulders, handstand-style, until her legs were high enough that she could grab the handle with her feet. The empty sockets of her arms screamed with the memory of fire, but adrenaline beat it back. _Now, just a twist, and..._

Unfortunately, she chose that moment to look back at the room, and almost screamed as she saw the Boomer pressed up in her face, so close she could feel its breath. She kicked aimlessly at the door handle and spat wild invective, the curses getting more broken until they became screams, the screams turning to sobs, the sobs giving way to greying vision and a feeling that she was breathing far too hard, far too fast. She slumped down against the door, no longer sure where she was or what she'd been fighting, just knowing that it was hopeless, hopeless...

Something touched her face and she shivered convulsively, the strength to scream no longer in her lungs. _It's just Sylia,_ something in the back of her mind told her, but that couldn't be true, Sylia was a Boomer now, or maybe she was a Boomer or maybe she was dead and this whole scene was the afterlife punishing her again and again until she broke, then coming back for more, for the last dregs of her sanity.

"Priss," a voice said, and a hand guided her face up. "Priss, it's all right. Look at me." She struggled against the grip, averting her eyes, but the voice kept coming, gentle, soothing. "Look at me. It's all right. I'm here." Eventually, if only to prove that the thing in front of her couldn't possibly be worse than the imagining of it, she let herself look-- and saw Sylia, just Sylia, looking back at her.

She blinked groggily, confused, sniffling back fat tears. She tried to speak, but her mouth felt numb, and when she did manage to move it she felt wet froth run down her chin. Sylia took a tissue and wiped it away, then draped something around her shoulders-- a blanket, she realised a moment later. She hadn't noticed her teeth were chattering until now. The world still seemed so very far away.

"What did you see, Priss?" Sylia asked.

She worked her jaw again, and eventually managed to make words come out. It felt like she'd bitten her tongue. "You... turned into a Boomer. Your face, your skin... everything came off..." She shook her head violently.

"...I'm sorry. I tried to break it to you in a way you might empathise with, but... I should have realised you might have a reaction like this."

"Was it real?" she said, staring back into Sylia's face. The shivers started up again. "Are you a Boomer...?"

"For your first answer, no, it wasn't real." Sylia slid an arm around her waist and gently coaxed her to standing, an act to which Priss offered little resistance. "For your second-- not exactly. But we don't have to talk about it now if you don't want. Either way, you should probably lie down first."

She nodded, and allowed Sylia to guide her back to the bed. She was about to navigate the rest herself, but instead Sylia lifted her, an arm under her legs, and carefully set her down in it. The loss of control was something she would have ordinarily found humiliating, but being cradled against Sylia's body felt so good, and when she moved away Priss fussed and grabbed her sleeve with her teeth and tried to tug her back. "Stay."

"Are you sure?"

Priss nodded, and Sylia pulled back the covers and slipped in beside her, sending a warm rush through Priss' body at the thought of how they must look. "The stunts I have to pull to finally get you into bed with me," Priss quipped weakly.

Sylia's eyes glinted with amusement. "You could have just asked," she said, pulling Priss close against her. "...So do you still want to hear this?"

She nodded again. "I-- didn't mean to flip out on you like that. I wasn't trying to-- I didn't mean--"

Sylia shushed her. "I know. As I said, I ought to have been more careful about how I brought it up." She paused for a moment, clearly searching for the words before continuing. "My father saw fit to give my brother and I... certain gifts. Not enough to change our legal status as humans, but enough to make me wonder from time to time." Her eyes seemed to flicker with something like humour, something like regret. "The cutoff for designating someone as a Boomeroid is seventy per cent enhanced. I'd estimate my own level at closer to fifty. It's still a lot."

Priss mulled over the information, nodding slowly. "It... I'm not scared of it. Of you. Not when I'm thinking straight." She let out a small, exasperated sound. "But I'm not gonna say I'm pleased with you either. One more thing you didn't see fit to tell us."

Sylia regarded her carefully. "Would you have?"

"Hell no! If I'd been like you, I..." She shrugged her shoulders in mute frustration. She'd never noticed just how much she talked with her hands before now. _Besides, I am like her. What a shitty thing to say, Priss._

"You're more like me than not, at the moment," Sylia echoed, in soft tones that hammered home just how cruel she must have sounded. "And am I so bad?"

She shook her head. "No. You're not bad. I was just freaked out, but... I don't think less of you or anything, if that's what you're worried about."

"But you hate Boomers. Why don't you think less of me?"

A weak, watery smile crossed her face. It sounded stupid even to her. "I guess maybe because I love you?"

Sylia looked amused. _Is she always going to wear that face every time I say that...?_ "Then do you think you could try loving yourself that much, too?"

That wasn't what she'd expected her to say at all. "I..." The thought of it seemed monumental, unapproachable. She could love Sylvie; she could love Sylia. But that was different. Applying any of what she felt about them to herself... it didn't even seem to make sense. "I don't know."

"You don't have to know right now. Just a thought to keep in mind."

Priss nodded and leaned into Sylia, suddenly exhausted from it all. It really was too much to think about right now. What was easier to think about was the way Sylia's perfume smelt (expensive, as always-- it probably cost more per bottle than Priss got paid for a gig), the texture of her robe against her cheek (soft, which was an anomaly with her; Sylia never compromised style for comfort, and secretly Priss thought it was part of her way of rebuffing people), what it felt like to sink against her and let her take her weight (very nice). She closed her eyes, feeling her facial muscles slowly relax. She really was tired, and she could have dozed off there if her mind hadn't been too full of thoughts, one of which eventually bubbled its way to the surface.

"Hey, Sylia."

"Mm?"

"So what did you mean anyway, with that whole thing about me being 'a weapon you couldn't live without'?"

Sylia winced. "It was just-- something I said in the moment. I don't really know what I meant by it." She looked at Priss, looking almost embarrassed for the fact. "I don't know if this will matter much, but it wasn't my intent to make you feel like an object. Especially with what you've gone through recently..."

Her eyes flickered open. "It's not that. You're right, normally I'd be majorly pissed off, but... in this case, I was actually thinking it might make a good song lyric." She grinned mischievously, and Sylia smiled in relief. "That's why I wanted to know what was behind it."

"Well, actually," said Sylia, and if there had been the tiniest of flushes on her face before, it only deepened at Priss' words. "I'd had those words in my mind for a while. They were from something I wrote back when all this started... a poem, I suppose you could say."

"Oho? I didn't know you wrote poetry, Sylia," she said, giving her a playful nudge with her shoulder before hissing with pain at the contact. "...tch. But seriously, you should have told me. Poetry and lyrics aren't that far apart, you know? We could inspire each other."

Sylia continued to look mortified. "It wasn't anything I ever wanted you to see."

Now it was Priss' turn to be amused at the turn things were taking, and she was revelling in it. It was a chance to, for a moment, take her mind off everything that had gone on and just be playful and free with Sylia, and she felt some of her old spirit surging back. "I don't imagine so, but you'll show me anyway, right? Don't you want to be," she leaned in and practically purred in Sylia's ear, "closer with me?"

Sylia shoved her back into the pillows. "...what was I even thinking, getting involved with an unpleasant little brat like you?"

"Mmf! Hey, don't push me, I'm an invalid!" She collapsed back onto the bed with a laugh, then winced as she tried to squirm upright again. Her earlier attempt at wallwalking couldn't have done her injuries any favours, she thought, and as she glanced down at herself she was alarmed to see blood soaking through the gauze taped to one of her shoulders. "...fuck. No, seriously. I think I blew my stitches."

As soon as Sylia saw the damage, her expression went serious. "Shit... I'm sorry. I didn't mean to push you that hard."

Priss shook her head. "It wasn't your fault. I must've done it to myself earlier when I was flipping out." Her throat felt hot and tight all of a sudden, and before she quite knew what was happening she felt herself start to cry. "Dammit, I'm not used to being this weak either! You shouldn't have to check yourself around me, and I shouldn't have to overthink how I'm gonna do every little thing without fucking myself up!" She tried to slam her fist down on the bed for emphasis, and when she remembered she couldn't do that either, the tears came all the more fiercely. "When do I get my arms back, goddamnit? When do I get out of this fucking bed and back into my life?"

She felt a hand tangle gently in her hair. "You have no idea how glad I am to hear you say that."

"What, to hear me rant about how much everything sucks and how if Mackie doesn't pull his shit together on those spare parts soon I'm gonna dump his ass into the Megatokyo Rift?" Priss couldn't keep her face from contorting in anger, but Sylia only laughed.

"Yes, that. But more importantly, to hear you say that you feel you have a life to go back to."

Priss felt the rush of anger start to subside. "I... yeah. You're right. For the first time in a long time, it feels that way." She bit her lip, hard enough to draw blood; it was one of the few things she could still do to vent her feelings, and Sylia didn't try to stop her. "Tell me this is real, Sylia? Tell me it isn't just going to go away? I'm so fucking scared, scared I'm gonna wake up dead and it's all gonna be gone, that I'm just dreaming this and this is some shitty-ass afterlife, like I'm gonna come around and there's no one there." She looked at Sylia, searching her eyes for any sign of the truth. "I can't tell what's real any more! What if you never came for me? I don't wanna wake up, I don't, please..."

"Priss. You're panicking again. Take deep breaths."

She tried, but it felt like trying to breathe underwater. "Wouldn't you-- panic if you didn't know whether you were dead or not?"

"That's the third time you've said something like that since the accident." She couldn't bring herself to look up, but she could almost feel Sylia scrutinising her, putting the pieces together. "What's making you think that you're dead?"

"I..." She drew another deep breath, more to avoid having to speak than for Sylia's sake. "I was supposed to, you know? I feel like I was supposed to."

"Go on."

"...Back when Sylvie died-- when I killed her..." She felt Sylia tense, and she knew she knew what she was going to say.

"When I came over to your trailer," Sylia finished for her. The missing piece fell into place. "When you left the Knight Sabers. You were planning on killing yourself."

Priss nodded, eyes screwed shut. "You-- stopped me. I mean, you weren't trying to or anything, but you did. And then when we fought Largo... when Anri stabbed me, I-- oh. Oh fuck. It must've been the implant, it was getting to me then, or something, but I-- I knew I was going to die, I was going to die there by Anri's hand for Sylvie, and it was okay, it was... it was how it was meant to be. I was ready. But-- but then I didn't die, and you weren't there, and it felt like I'd gone to this grey place where everyone was gone and nothing was right, and I..." Her voice broke with a squeak.

Sylia shifted to lie back down beside Priss, draping an arm carefully over her torso. "You're not dead," she said quietly. "Or if you are, then I'm dead and this is my afterlife, too. And if this is the afterlife where I have to watch-- everything I love get torn away from me over and over, then I deserve it." Priss felt the faintest, feather-soft brush of lips against her forehead. "If I hadn't been so preoccupied with what I felt about you, I could have been there for you." She barked out a humourless laugh. "Irony."

Priss snuggled into her side, feeling how warm Sylia was, her heartbeat-- trying to believe she was real. "If you're being punished for what you did to me... then if I say it's okay, then you don't need to be punished any more. You don't have to lose me. You can stay."

"Right." Sylia rested her chin atop Priss' head. "Even if this were the afterlife, we wouldn't have to lose each other again." It was a strange sort of conclusion to come to, but for Priss-- and, she hoped, for Sylia-- it worked. She couldn't be sure that any of this was real, but if they couldn't find a way to work with what it was, they weren't the brains and the brawn of the Knight Sabers. Actually, she felt like complimenting Sylia on that right now, so she did.

"You're a genius, you know."

"I'm well aware." Sylia laughed softly, almost ruefully. "And you're my warrior."

"I like that better than 'weapon', anyway," said Priss with a grin. "...So will you show me your poetry sometime?"

Sylia pushed a curl of hair back from Priss' forehead. "Is that meant literally or as a metaphor?"

"Both."

"...Then yes. To both."

She let herself lose track of time to the rhythm of Sylia's heart, forgetting the boundaries of her body in the other's embrace.


	8. (Sylia) Flip Side

"Now you might have noticed something unusual happening in your body over the past few days," Sylia said as she wheeled Priss out of the elevator and through the door to her penthouse apartment.

Priss rolled her eyes theatrically. "Yeah, no kidding. It's got two fewer limbs, just lost several pints of blood, and now it's got to deal with the emotional and mental strain of realising I'm shacked up with you. --hey!" She narrowly ducked a play-swat from Sylia. "I'm telling it like it is!"

"As amusing, and admittedly true, as your observations are, it's not what I meant. Now if you'd let me finish--"

"--you know, I don't actually need a wheelchair. It's not my legs that are missing," she said. "It feels weird being pushed around. Though I guess I shouldn't complain about chauffeur service. --you were saying."

Sylia sighed. "I'll cut to the chase. Since the accident, have you noticed any withdrawal symptoms from the drugs you were on?"

Priss' eyebrows went up. "Actually, now that you mention it, nothing like I expected. With everything else that was going on, I didn't notice, but... did you do something to me?"

"I had the doctors put you on a custom medication regime that would keep you from going into withdrawal until you started to heal," she explained. "I didn't think it would be wise to have you dealing with that at the same time as recovering from your injuries. Unfortunately, you can't stay on it forever."

"Great." She kicked against the footrest. "So now you're saying that on top of everything else, I'm gonna be sweating and screaming like a stuck AD Police officer. Thanks, Sylia, you really know how to make life fun." 

"It won't be as bad as you think. You're going to feel miserable for a while, but from your substance profile it shouldn't be anything you can't handle." She turned and looked Priss directly in the eyes. "And I _am_ going to insist on it. As a Knight Saber, but moreover... as someone I love, I refuse to lose you to this."

Priss snorted. "Guess that answers my next question."

"...I am _not_ supporting your drug habit." Her voice was stern. "That's one thing I will not do for you."

"Not forever! But just..." Her eyes roamed around the room with its vast glass windows, its minimalistic yet clearly bespoke furnishings, nothing out of style or out of place. "With your resources, you could get the best. The worst part of it's the stuff they cut it with, right? You could find me a source that was pure--"

Sylia stopped wheeling the chair, and knelt down in front of its occupant, eyes hard. "Priss. This isn't you talking."

"Oh, and you know so much about me?"

"I should hope I do, with as much as we've worked together." She put a hand on Priss' knee; the force of her trembling made her bracelets clack against each other. "Look how much you're shaking. You're not even weaned off the treatments yet, and all I have to do is bring up the _subject_ of drugs and suddenly you're not with me any more. I can see it in your eyes-- the gears turning over in your mind, trying to figure out how to get what you need." She reached up to lay her hands gently, tentatively, on Priss' bandaged shoulders. "But I can't let this happen to you. So help me, Priscilla, if I have to tie you to the bed at night I will not let this happen to you."

Priss made a face at the use of her full name, then followed it up with a laugh. "You'd like that, huh."

Sylia put a hand to her chin, a small smile spreading across her lips. "I can't say the image doesn't have... a certain appeal," she said, trying to play it off as a joke and knowing she wasn't succeeding. Priss just flashed her a knowing grin, but the thoughts going through Sylia's head were altogether less playful in nature. _Priss is probably the most helpless she's ever been right now, and I'm getting a thrill from the thought of adding to that? Maybe she was right about me... maybe I do take pleasure from pulling their strings. And if that's true, then how much of what the Knight Sabers were founded on has been a lie? How much have I been using them to facilitate my own desire for control?_

***

_"Who the fuck are you?" The girl squinted through the headlights' glare, one hand clutching her gut. She spat blood as she spoke: from observation, Sylia guessed at least two broken ribs and some sort of impact to the lower abdomen, possibly from debris that had struck her during the fall. That the girl was conscious at all was impressive, but then Sylia had seen this one fight: she knew she was tenacious. She'd seen her jump into a gang of men twice her size and come out as the only victor, seen her disembowel a man with only a switchblade. Still, she wanted to watch how the girl handled this, and was amused, though unsurprised, to see that she was trying to stand. Her leg skidded awkwardly on the wet road, and she croaked in pain, but she kept trying._

_"I said, who are you?" she snarled, baring bloodied teeth. When Sylia didn't answer, the snarl became a desperate cry, and metal flashed from between the girl's knuckles. "Fucking bastard!" The girl slashed at her faster than she'd expected, all bright eyes and feral rage, but she was ready: she dodged to what seemed to be her weaker side, leaving the girl swiping at air. The girl whirled on her again, and again met with empty space, her howls of anger becoming more and more primal as she tried and failed to hit her target._ Let's see what it takes to break you, _thought Sylia._ Let's see how you act when the chips are down.

_Eventually Sylia decided she'd seen enough, and the next time the girl lunged, she caught her off-guard with a swift punch to the stomach. Doubled over, wheezing violently, she let the knife clatter to the ground, fighting to look up at Sylia through tear-blurred eyes. Her hands were contorted into claws, and she ground her teeth in barely restrained mania; her shoulders shook as if she were seizing. Her voice, through all of it, was unbowed. "Fucking Genom whore, that what you are? Get the hell off my turf, you fucking--" She staggered to her knees, vomiting bright red blood onto the asphalt._

_Sylia knelt down to rest a hand on her shoulder, undaunted when the girl lashed out at her again; she caught her wild flailing with an effortless fist. "My name is Sylia Stingray. Your zeal for battle impresses me. If you'd like to hear me out, I have a proposition for you."_

_"--don't need your--" The girl coughed up another dark splatter of blood, followed by what had probably been a meager dinner. "--help--"_

_"I'm sure you don't. But together we're stronger, Priscilla Asagiri." At that, Priss lifted her head and fixed her with a baleful stare. "You want to get back at Genom, don't you? For what they took from you?"_

_"How do you know my name?"_

_"Let's just say I've been interested in you for quite some time. Now, what do you say? Do you want a real chance at taking down Genom? To give up riding solo and be part of a team who'll have your back?"_

_She coughed weakly. "You must know I do--"_

_Sylia extended a hand to Priss. "Then, will you entrust me with that burning heart of yours?"_

***

"...Earth to Sylia." She looked up to find Priss leaning over her, auburn hair a curtain around the two of them. "Getting a little caught up in that fantasy, there." She jerked her head slightly to the right. "The bedroom's that way, but you'll have to push."

"You're changing the subject," she said softly, willing the blush to fade from her cheeks.

"Yeah. I like this one better." Priss could only lean down so far, but she was clearly trying to close the distance, and Sylia gave in to temptation and met her the rest of the way.

The memory had done little to convince her that she was doing this for the right reasons. She could see the same tactics from the past playing themselves out again: let the pup wear herself out with her own aimless flailing, then catch her by the scruff when she was easier to handle. She was still seeing Priss as an animal who needed to be tamed, who needed to be convinced of her helplessness before she would duck her head for the leash. But then, she tried to tell herself, what did that change? It didn't change the fact that Priss needed her now, and it didn't change her feelings for Priss. Besides, maybe the influence of a control freak was the only thing that could drag Priss out of the mess she was in.

They were flimsy excuses for not being a better person, she knew. The incriminations were laced all through Priss' motions, for one who was looking for them, and she was: the way she chased Sylia's lips, less lustful and more demanding reassurance; the little sounds that escaped her every time she caught a breath, as though fearful of being parted. The Priss before her was her creation, and for that she was responsible; but she wasn't here to take responsibility. She was here, on her knees, in front of Priss, because it was what she desired, just as Priss was what she was because she had desired it. She'd desired to control her, and when she'd threatened to escape that control, she'd desired to see her come crawling back.

Wasn't that why she'd really left Priss so long before stepping in? To make sure she came back to her of her own free will? Wasn't that the penance she'd required, after almost losing her to Sylvie's memory? _The penalty for seceding from the Knight Sabers is death;_ but Sylia's subconscious knew of much more creative punishments. Ones that would properly humble the precious weapon who had dared to leave her side. In fact, perhaps the extraction of more humility from her was only fitting.

\--Sylia pulled away, mortified by the imagery that had just flashed through her mind. A bloody tangle of past memories and future possibilities, all centred on breaking the woman before her even further than she'd already been broken. She blinked rapidly, trying to purge her memory of the things she'd seen, but they kept coming; and with them, the warm, swampy haze of arousal, distorting everything, clouding her thoughts.

"...Okay, something is seriously fubar on the top floor of Apartment Sylia." She felt something tap her shoulder. "Hey. Wake up."

She refocused her eyes on Priss, who was nudging her with a foot and looking concerned. "What happened?" asked Priss. "You just... switched off for a second there. You all right?" She flashed a lopsided smile, though her heart didn't seem in it; she was clearly worried she'd upset Sylia somehow. "Am I that good?"

Sylia got to her feet, and leaned in to lay a soft kiss atop Priss' hair. "Something like that," she said. "No, I just... sorry. Nothing you did. Just tired, perhaps. It's been a long week."

Priss didn't seem to be buying it, and it was clear that whatever she did, she had to avert Priss' suspicion that she'd somehow damaged their relationship. "Why don't we go lie down," she said. "I really am exhausted, and besides, I've been holding back a few surprises that I think you're going to like."

"Surprises, huh." That seemed to mollify her, or at least distract her attention. Priss wasn't stupid, and Sylia wasn't fool enough to think that the incident was off her radar. "Well, I guess I could be persuaded. Particularly if they're surprises in your bedroom."

"Our bedroom, now," said Sylia, and that at least was the truth. 

She wheeled Priss into the room and allowed herself to thrill to her gasp of delight as she saw what Sylia had done. Everything that Priss had thought had been lost with her trailer was here: her clothes, her guitar, the toolkit for her bike, even the beat-up old television that would probably never be used again with the amount of videoscreens Sylia had around the penthouse, but it was a pre-Quake model and Sylia had guessed it might have sentimental value. Atop her shoulder bag, the one she'd left at Sylia's that night, were the keys to her bike and trailer. It wasn't much, particularly by Sylia's standards of living, but it was everything Priss owned, and Sylia hadn't thought she deserved to lose it again.

 _So you still decide what she deserves to lose,_ said the voice in Sylia's head. She pushed it aside. 

"You'll find your bike in the garage downstairs," she said. "The management at Hot Legs was holding it as collateral against everything you'd cost them in damages and missed performances, but we were able to come to an arrangement."

"Wow. Thanks, Sylia," said Priss with a genuine smile. "I really didn't think I'd see any of this stuff again."

"It was in your best interests. Quite frankly, if we'd left the place for the ADP to pick over, you'd be up to here"-- she made a chopping motion at her throat --"in criminal charges for possession of illegal substances." She flashed a knowing grin. "That, and most of the weaponry you had holed up in there wasn't exactly carry legal."

"I wasn't carrying it." Priss stuck out her tongue. "...But seriously, thanks. I can't believe you saved the Stormwind. I'd pretty much resigned myself to not getting her back."

"She's all yours, once you're fit to ride," said Sylia. "Speaking of. If you'll excuse me a moment." She disappeared into one of the side closets, watching Priss watch her go, and emerged carrying a large white box. Opening it up, she revealed its contents to Priss: a pair of mechanical arms, their chrome finish polished to a mirror sheen.

"I thought you might prefer this to something more realistic," she said. "For the sake of not sugar-coating the truth. If you'd rather, they can be covered to look like..." Her voice trailed off as she looked over at Priss, who was staring fixedly at the contents of the box, her face an unreadable mask. "...Priss?" she questioned softly, bracing for either a blowup or tears. But neither was forthcoming. Instead, when Priss did speak, it was in an almost-whisper, the likes of which she hadn't heard since she'd announced she was quitting the Knight Sabers.

"It..." She looked up at Sylia as if only just realising that she'd spoken. "It's just a lot to take in. Looking at this and thinking... this is my life now. This is what I am."

"No. You're more than your body, Priss. You're more than your injuries."

Priss said nothing, but the look that passed between them said that they both knew what she was holding back. _I'm a Boomer now, and even if it's what you are, I hate it in me._

Still, she wasn't angry-- Priss' anger was not the kind that hid itself away-- and Sylia saw her chance. "Do you want to try them on now? The sooner you do, the sooner you'll get used to it." _And the more chance I'll have of not losing you to Boomer Syndrome,_ she thought but didn't say.

Priss nodded her acquiescence, but made no move to step out of the chair. The subdued reaction didn't sit well with Sylia. That defeated look, that you-can-do-anything-you-want-to-me-I-don't-care look, reminded her of things she never wanted to think about in conjunction with Priss. But she needed her healed, so she guided her up onto the bed, one hand at the small of her back, and began unbinding her gauze.

"It'll be better this way," she said, knowing it was meaningless small talk, devised to distract her from what this felt like more than anything. She lifted one of the arms out of the box: it was surprisingly light, lighter than an ordinary limb would have to be. With Priss' bare shoulder now exposed, she placed the inner joint of the arm against the stub of muscle and bone, and prepared to activate it. 

"This is probably going to hurt, just as a warning. The limb needs to integrate and bind with the parts of your skeleton that have already undergone bioanatasis. The fusion catalysts will--"

"--Stop!"

She stopped and looked over at Priss, who turned back to her, wild-eyed, pale-faced. "Stop, please... just... just give me a moment. I need to-- I--" She drew a shaky breath. "Explain to me exactly what you're doing. From the top, in plain Japanese. No psychobabble."

"Technobabble."

"Whatever."

"All right." Sylia held up the arm, swiveling it to show Priss the inside of the joint, where it would be fitted to her body. "See here-- right now, this part looks like an ordinary titanium shape-memory alloy--"

"--If you say so."

"--but in fact, it's a thin sheet of solid-adhesion surfactant... I mean, it's made up of nanomachines." She reached into the box for a small handheld device. "When I bring the nanos out of their dormant state, like so..." She pressed a button on the device, and the metallic surface sprang to life: rippling and liquid at first, then reshaping itself into a sheaf of solid, needle-thin spines. Priss winced. "The probes will be fired into your body, and the nanos can begin the fusion reaction." 

"Fusion reaction?"

Unable to find anything to fuse with, the spines receded. She set the limb down between them. "The nanomachines that are already in your body operate on a principle similar to the Fusion Boomer, in that they attempt to integrate foreign tissue with their own systems in order to increase their mass. But since carbon-based human tissue and titanium-based Boomers are nothing alike, the tissue must first be converted to a material that the Boomer can assimilate. Or, to put it more simply, digested and replaced with a metallic copy. We call this bioanatasis, literally, 'extension of the Boomer network into biological material'--"

"...Cybermorphosis," Priss whispered.

"I thought you didn't want technobabble."

"I've-- researched enough. To know that this is a thing. It's a late-stage symptom of Boomer Syndrome."

"It's also a medical technique. My father pioneered it. In this case, we'll be fighting fire with fire, or I suppose, more correctly, a virus with a virus: the nanos we introduce into your body will take over the programming of the existing nanos, forcing them to halt their progress through your body, and bringing them under the control of the computer in here." She tapped the limb.

"The computer in there," said Priss, jerking her head towards the limb. "Not me."

"Do you know how to control nanomachines?" said Sylia. "You don't control your own blood cells either, but without them you wouldn't be able to fight off infection. And without the nanomachines, you won't be able to fight off the infection that's currently eating its way through your body at a rate of around a thousand cubic centimeters a day."

"Point... taken, and more brutally made than I wanted to hear." She looked the limb up and down. "So what if the 'good guys' don't win?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"The virus you and Mackie apparently loaded in there to fight off the other virus. What if it doesn't come out on top?"

Sylia took a deep breath. "We try not to think about that."

"That's your answer?" Priss almost screamed. "'We try not to think about that'? So that's it, no other solution--"

"No, there is no other solution!" Sylia surprised herself with the force of her own yell. "You wanted it straight, well, this is straight. If this goes wrong, you're toast, kaput, scrap metal on a rampage, and chances are someone's going to have to put several rounds of charges through your skull and chances are it's going to be me. This is a long-shot, one-chance, last-ditch solution and we have three months at _best_ to make it work, and there is nothing else we can do unless you can turn back time because this got screwed up long, long ago, back when I stopped watching what was going on with you because I was mad at you over some petty little..." She trailed off, clutching her hair in her hands, forcing herself to take more deep breaths. "So that's it. I screwed up, and this is the only thing I can do and I sure to God hope it works, because otherwise I... I killed a teammate. I killed you because I fell in love with you, and now I have to watch you die."

The room was quiet for a while after that, Sylia's noisy breathing and occasional sniffling the only sounds. Eventually, she felt something touch her leg, and lifted her head to see Priss looking back at her.

"If this is hell," she said, uncharacteristically quiet, "then it has it in for both of us, huh."

Sylia just stared at her. "You're forgiving me just like that?"

Priss shrugged her shoulders. "I didn't say I forgive you. But I'm not sure I wanna spend the last moments of my life pissed off at you, either. Just seems... pointless."

She forced a laugh. "Never thought I'd hear you say being angry was pointless." It was a sad sort of thing to hear from Priss, if she was perfectly honest. Her anger might not have been the healthiest thing, but it was the driving force behind so much of her passion and power. If Priss really was going to die, she didn't want to watch her just ebb away without a fight. "But seriously. If you're upset at me-- and you have every right to be-- then don't hold back." She laid her hand on Priss' knee and gave it a gentle squeeze. "Your anger won't drive me away. I'm as aware as you are that we might not have all the time in the world, and I would rather not waste it either."

"I..." A new expression spread across Priss' features-- not quite a smile, but something like relief, like a darkness passing from her. "Yeah. I'll keep that in mind." Her eyes flicked to and from the artificial limb, and she let out an antsy little huff. "All right. Let's get this show on the road, shall we?"

"No turning back, you know."

"Yeah," said Priss. "Like there ever was."

The limb was set into place against Priss' shoulder, and with the push of a button the nanos were deployed. To her credit, Priss hardly made a sound, though the pain must have been excruciating: living needles fired into muscles barely recovered from their last trauma, now turned to long filaments of nanomachines that tore their way through flesh in search of their opposites. But then, physical pain was never what brought Priss low: her ability to handle injuries that would have felled most people and still remain standing was almost inhuman, Sylia thought, the tiniest bit amused by the irony. Sometimes she wondered if the girl hardly felt pain at all, if something in childhood, perhaps, had knocked her insensate for life. It would certainly explain the amount of times she'd been thrown from her motorbike, sent skidding across the asphalt like a rag doll, and had got up and crawled back for more. Then again, maybe that was just explained by Priss being Priss.

The readout on the remote device confirmed that the limb was functioning properly, and so she linked up the other one, with similar results. By the end of it all Priss' eyes were glazed over, her face shiny with sweat, but she was conscious and responsive, and all of her readouts were normal. It had gone as well as she could have expected, and better than she had expected.

"It'll probably be a while before you can control them fluidly," she said, "but I'd like you to try now. Just move a finger."

Priss frowned at her hand and made faces for several long moments, then, in a smooth motion that had been designed to look natural but in this case looked anything but, curled up her middle finger-- and then recoiled, as if it were making the obscene gesture at her.

"That," she said, looking Sylia dead in the eye, "is unsettling to watch."

In a tone that she hoped conveyed apology, she replied, "I don't know what to say, other than you'll get used to it. Don't expect it to feel natural or right all at once."

"I don't know if this will ever feel right," Priss admitted, the new limbs still limp and unmoving at her sides. "But-- and I know it doesn't sound like it. But I am thankful. To you and Mackie both, for doing this for me."

"I know it's a lot to take in. Just give it a chance to work out."

Priss grunted an affirmation, and she knew the conversation was over. "Come on," she said, patting the pillows as she stood up. "Why don't we get changed into something else and lie down for a bit. It's been a long day."

Priss glanced around the room, then smirked. "Only if I get to borrow from your lingerie closet."

"You're not my size." Already in the process of changing, she threw her bra at Priss' head. "I had your clothes cleaned, since half of them were lying in a junkyard and the other half were on the floor of the junkyard you were calling a trailer. You can wear what you usually wear for tonight."

"For tonight, hm?" Priss rid herself of the bra with a toss of her head, then waved an arm in the general vicinity of her laundry pile a few times before eventually managing to snag a t-shirt by one extended finger. "Does that mean I get my pick of the store some other night?"

"On the same condition everyone else gets free lingerie, yes." She smiled impishly. "Model for one of my advertising campaigns."

"--You have _got_ to be kidding me," Priss said from halfway inside the t-shirt. "Looking like... hey, could you give me a hand here? I feel like I've got two UFO catchers strapped to my arms."

"You'd be surprised. A lot of people like the cyber look." Sylia stepped up and helped Priss pull her shirt down over her head, then unzipped her pants and let them pool on the ground at her feet. "Now go, before I make you spend the rest of the night putting those servo motors through their paces."

"You're gonna regret this when you can't keep up, old maid," Priss tried to quip, though the effect was rather ruined by a yawn in the middle. She half-climbed, half-rolled under the covers, and sank into the bed with the satisfied groan of someone who either hadn't slept well for a week or had never known silk sheets before-- both of which she could believe of Priss, given the circumstances.

"Comfortable?" asked Sylia as she slipped in beside her, mostly just to hear her say yes.

"'S wonderful," she mumbled from beneath the covers. "Time to go." And before Sylia had time to ask what that meant-- if it had meant anything at all-- Priss was unconscious.


	9. (Priss) Snake Eyes

Dreams, dreamt multitrack like a mix machine with all the channels cranked up to max. Threads of dreams, meeting and parting, like schools of fish blurring together in the ocean, like nanomachines chewing through a nervous system.

Dreams of Megatokyo.

Priss scrambled awake with great gulping breaths as she tried to get her bearings, the fragments of dreams still swimming in her vision. She stared at her hand and blinked, willing the illusion of metal plating to fade, waiting to wake up again.

 _Right._ It hit her with a jolt. _These are my hands now. It's not a dream._

She turned her head to check on Sylia, her vision smearing unpleasantly as a headache clamped down on her skull. Apparently, the simple act of moving was enough to remind her body that it was in the early stages of withdrawal. She was amazed to find that her bedmate hadn't been woken by her flailing, or at least she assumed that military-stiff pose was what passed for sleep in Sylia's world. Shadows painted slashes across the hollow of her throat, stark predator stripes that added to the sense that she could potentially spring up at any moment, like a cat.

Gingerly, she pushed the covers aside and crept to the bathroom on trembling legs, picking her way through the piles of her belongings. Even the faint street light through the window made her squint and turn away. _Mother of all hangovers and I didn't even drink. Fucking hell._

In the bathroom she groped for a water glass, the blurry vagueness of objects in the dark adding to the trouble she had directing her hands. Still, her coordination had improved significantly in the time she'd been asleep; she must have been moving the arms in her dreams. She managed to grab the glass on only the third try, the delicacy with which her fingers encircled it surprising her. She had half-expected it to simply shatter beneath the force of her grip.

Turning the faucet on was harder, but still manageable. _Sylia and Mackie really outdid themselves on the neural relays in these things,_ she thought with grudging admiration. If she was improving this fast, she could be playing guitar again inside a week. She stuck the glass under the faucet, briefly catching her reflection in the mirror, and almost dropping the glass when she did.

Half of her face was gone.

Not gone like blown away, in a tangle of metal or guts. Gone like _gone_ , like there was a blank space her eyes wouldn't focus on. _Trick of the light,_ she thought, reaching behind her back and swatting the light switch on the first try, the flashbulb intensity forcing her to screw her eyes shut. Once she'd managed to pry them open, she bent over the sink and slowly lifted her face to the mirror again.

It was even clearer in the light-- if an absence of input could be said to be clear. From slightly above her left eye to her jawline, in place of what should have been her reflection was nothingness: a null space her gaze danced around, in sharp contrast to the rest of her features. Yet she could still feel her face, and when she reached up to touch her cheek, her hand disappeared behind the anomaly as well.

She shifted her head from side to side to confirm it. It wasn't that anything was missing; that part of her vision was a blind spot. Relief swelled in her for a moment, then subsided as she realised what that meant. She rubbed at her eyes, blinked, refocused: no change. She was losing her sight.

 _...fuck. This is because I'm off the drugs._ Sylia didn't get it: the drugs kept the Boomers back, away from her mind. They were freedom for an hour, a day, and even if it was only a day, how many more of those did she have left? With or without the drugs, she was going down the tubes. She could at least hold onto something. She could at least give them a fight.

She needed money. Where could she get money? Her mind went over the options. Now that she had her things back, it was possible there was still something left in her wallet. She went back into the bedroom and grabbed her bag from the dresser, then turned and almost bumped into Sylia.

Dark shadows pooled beneath her eye sockets, and she wondered why she hadn't noticed how tired she looked before. "No, Priss," Sylia said gently, placing her hand over the bag.

"But--" She was cut off by a coughing fit. Her throat spasmed violently, and it felt like something was trying to climb up the inside of it. She hunched over and spat out a black glob of flesh that somehow never hit the ground, suspended in mid-air, dangling from long, thin strands that glinted in the light from the street--

Metal. Millions of threads of living, twisting metal.

She tried to yell, to scream, but the nanos had stolen her voice. As the writhing mass of wires reared up, a blood-slicked metal cobra, she could feel its grip on her vocal cords tense and relax, forcing out words of its own.

 _`Sylia... Ssstingray,`_ it hissed, swaying in an ancient dance, the metal contorting into a fang-filled jaw. _`Now how do you like... the face... of the victor?`_

The cobra lunged, and Sylia ducked, dropping into a defensive crouch. _Fuck... I'm not the target!_ Priss fought to bring her muscles back under her control, to stop her body's advances, to make it do something, anything else, but it wouldn't obey. _It was after Sylia all along! I have to get it away from her!_ A quick backwards roll brought Sylia up against the dresser, and she grabbed one of Priss' switchblades and slashed at the creature. Metal harmlessly scraped against metal, and the creature dove for her face again, fangs bared.

 _Shit! She couldn't have grabbed a gun?_ That knife hadn't been the only weapon on the dresser, and a gun would have actually stood a chance of doing damage. Then she remembered that she was the monster. Suddenly, Sylia's actions took on a new perspective. She couldn't damage the thing with a switchblade, but she could hold it off. She was buying time so Priss could regain control. _She's doing it for me. I'm the monster, but she's doing it for me. She believes I can do this._

The words flashed through her mind, the image of Sylia backlit in the doorway to her trailer, looking back at her. _I have faith in you._

They'd been empty words at the time, words she hadn't believed. Now at last they were real to her, and her dwindling spirit surged. With all the strength and resolve that she had, she screamed at her body to move. _Anything... please... just a finger, like before._ Her hands were clenched at her sides, rigid and clawed, unyielding. _Just one finger..._ She focused all of her willpower on moving just that one finger, her middle finger, pushing the message through over and over; over and over Sylia's strikes rang out, metal on metal, the vibrations echoing through her augmented bones. _Move, dammit! Move! Move!_ Fury built in her until she thought her brain would burst, slamming itself against the walls of its cage; blood vessels thundered, her teeth grinding on metal and wires and suddenly, finally she had control, she was biting the thing, and before it could recover she ran from the room, putting all the distance between herself and Sylia that she could, the mass of wires shrieking in her mouth.

There was no plan. There was no time to think. All that mattered was getting away, far from this place, far from anywhere that bastard could get to Sylia. She grabbed the nearest heavy object, a free-standing monitor, and lobbed it straight through the window with a deafening crash. _If you need my body so badly, Largo or Mason or whatever the hell your name is, then get me out of this one. And if not... well, sucks to be you._ Leaping through the hole she'd made, she entrusted herself to her new body, and to the air.

Two, maybe three seconds to impact. The truth was a cold slap to her senses as the lights of Megatokyo swirled and spun beneath her, the sidewalk rushing up faster than she'd planned until something wrenched inside her calves-- _am I caught on something?_ \--and it felt like she was being ripped in half all over again, every nerve and tendon in her legs screaming revenge. Then the world stopped moving, the air went still, and she was somehow on the ground, looking back at her reflection in the window of the Silky Doll.

Her lower body was a deformed mess of metal, two massive Boomer appendages-- evidently the ones that had caught her fall-- protruding from her torso. She could feel the bulging cables under her skin, winding up the sides of her ribcage, encircling her throat, gripping her skull. The snake lolled from between her forced-open jaws, a grotesque second tongue. She couldn't feel her own tongue; perhaps the snake had swallowed it up. She could see the way her reflection fell, superimposed, over a perfect lingerie-clad shop dummy, and felt like she should want to cry, want to punch something, but she didn't. It didn't even feel real any more.

She had to keep moving. _Bike... garage,_ her memory provided, and she seized control of her new limbs, her insistent commands drowning out Largo's presence. _Forward. Forward. Again. Faster._ It felt like bashing buttons on a videogame console, a cheap and unresponsive one at that-- one of those knockoff "TV Game" things from Chinatown, they'd had one of those back at the orphanage, useless piece of shit-- but each stride carried her surprisingly far.

The Stormwind stood out plainly in the private garage, parked as it was well away from Sylia's fleet of cars, no doubt in case of property damage. She walked over to it, observing how its hide gleamed, good as new. Sylia had had it given the VIP treatment, even had its scratches buffed out and a new coat of wax rubbed into its curves. She knew Sylia likely hadn't done it herself, but the thought of her caring for the bike as Priss would have done, her long, slender fingers working polish into every crevice, filled her with a mixture of warmth and pain. It was a stirring image, and something that would never happen now. In the best-case scenario she could imagine right now, she would never see Sylia again.

In that moment, the bike seemed like a threshold: a proud, shining relic of former times, and the means by which she would end those times forever. She took a deep breath, no longer able to be numb, her heart a trembling mess and her legs, though metal, having never felt so weak. _Hate to have to do this to you, buddy,_ she thought as she laid a hand on the gas tank, _but I've got no choice._

At the touch of her artificial hand, the engine sputtered to life, and she could feel the stirrings of power as if they were extensions of her own nervous system, the bike's eager energy feeding back into her blood. _Well, I guess that's an experience I'd never have had any other way._ She straddled the bike and gripped it tight, then ground her teeth against the pain as two thick cables tore themselves from her sides, whipping around wildly before latching onto the bike and burrowing in. _Now go!_ The bike reared like a wild animal, but she didn't fall: her body felt as if it were perfectly contoured to the bike's shape, aware of every shift and start before they happened. In any other circumstance the feeling would have been electric, and even now some part of her thrilled to it.

 _Far away,_ she urged, trying not to look back. _Anywhere Sylia isn't._ The bike sped up. _I won't be your tool, Largo. While there's strength in me to fight you, you won't have her._

 _And for how long will that be?_ a voice purred. But she ignored it, and rode on.


	10. (Sylia) Kill Switch

Sylia ran to the shattered window, her eyes scanning the city below, searching for any sign of Priss. She screamed her name into the dark, not expecting a response and not getting one: it was a useless plea, a prayer for the damage to be undone, for time to be turned back.

 _How did he know?_ was the question that filled her mind as she hurried to the elevator, mashing the button for the basement level until the doors slammed shut. Largo had turned Priss into a Trojan horse, riding on the assumption that, months or years down the line, his nanos would overwhelm Priss' natural defences, and he could use her to get to Sylia. Had it simply been that she was a Knight Saber-- would any of them have sufficed? Or had Largo's profiling of Sylia revealed things about her that even she hadn't come to terms with at the time? How long was this long game that Largo had been playing, and how deep into her memories, her desires, did it go?

What she did know was that thanks to it-- thanks to _her_ \-- Priss had been violated, body and soul. The image of the snake almost dislocating Priss' jaw as it forced its way out of her mouth, the horror and helplessness etched on her face as she stood frozen, unable to fight: these things would linger in Sylia's memory for a long time to come. _And all because Sylia Stingray had to have her little war against Genom,_ she thought with disgust. _And she couldn't do it alone, no: she had to go dragging in cannon fodder for her fight. Priss would have been better off staying on the streets._

The elevator stopped at the basement, and she got out and immediately began stripping off her nightclothes, retrieving her softsuit and tugging it on. She was stepping into the hardsuit when the ding of the elevator caught her attention, and she turned to see Mackie running out of it, panting madly.

"Sis! What's going on?" He pulled up short as he got a closer look at her, brows furrowing. "What happened to your face?"

"My face?" She reached up to touch her cheek, noting nothing out of the ordinary.

"No, not there-- your eyes. There's something weird going on with your eyes... it's on your neck, too. It's all blue, like..."

 _Like a Boomer._ She knew the answer even before she felt it, the rough, hard texture of the skin under her eyes, more like metal than flesh. "When I kissed her," she murmured to herself, bringing her fingers to her lips in memory of the act. It made sense now: that uncharacteristic flash of cruelty, those violent urges out of nowhere. The kiss had been a vector for the nanos to get into her system-- and a payload that would have been hard to activate if they hadn't been intimate. She felt her jaw set, her teeth clicking together in irritation. _So you do play the long game, Largo._

"...When you kissed who?" She looked back to Mackie, half expecting a ribald expression, but all she saw on his face was concern. "Will you please explain what all this is about?"

"Priss went Boomer." The hardsuit snapped into place around her; she picked up the helmet. "The implant was a copy of Largo's consciousness, and Priss was a Trojan horse. Naturally, he reacted aggressively to our attempts to thwart his control." She pulled on the helmet and prepared to close the visor. "She's out in the city now-- she fled to keep from hurting me. I have to get to her before..." _Before what? Before he tears her apart? It's a little late for that._ Truthfully, she didn't know what she was trying to do. She knew she didn't stand much chance of saving either of them, if Priss could even be saved at all. But she wouldn't leave her to die alone. And she wasn't going to let Largo get away with this without a fight.

"So you're both infected, and now you're going out there to fight her alone?" Mackie protested. "If Largo's nanos are inside you, we need to get you treated! You can't be fighting, especially not Priss!"

"My nanos have been in place longer than hers. Their defences are strong. They should be able to hold off the invasion for a while."

"For a while? No!" The look on his face was aghast. "You don't have to do this! Why don't you send Linna and Nene?"

"No. I'm not sending Nene against Priss-- that's a suicide mission. And Linna's close-range-- just a touch from Priss' hands would be enough to infect the hardsuit. She wouldn't be safe fighting her in hand-to-hand combat."

"And you would?"

"It's my responsibility!" Mackie's face froze at the sudden outburst. "I won't send any more of them to die for me. It's my fault this happened to Priss, from beginning to end. This is my job."

"What about that whole Knight Sabers code? No solo ops?"

"As of now, the Knight Sabers are disbanded." She flipped down her visor and headed back in the direction of the elevator. "I'll deal with my own problems. The way I should have been doing all along."

Mackie grabbed her arm. "You can't do this!"

"Don't touch me!" She jerked her arm away violently. "We don't know for sure how this thing spreads! You could get infected too."

"Only if I kissed you, you stupid jerk," Mackie said with a half-laugh, half-sob, tears spilling down his face. He grabbed her hardsuit in a tight hug before she could stop him. "Sylia. Please. I don't want to lose you. You're all I've got."

Inside the helmet, Sylia blinked back her own tears. "I have to do this," she said softly. "I'll try to come back safe."

"That's a lie and we both know it." Mackie looked up at her. "At least-- let me come with you."

"Come with me? And do what?" It was harshly put, but if there was anything she could do to make him stay of his own free will, she'd try it.

"Well, what are _you_ planning to do out there?" he snapped back. "Go and get yourself killed fighting Priss to satisfy your own sense of justice?"

"That's not--"

He laughed bitterly, suddenly sounding old for his years. "Hit the mark, did I? Look, you don't just get to cut loose and act like that makes it all right, like going it alone is going to make everything go back to normal for everyone else who got caught up in it." He directed a fierce look at her helmet. "If you want to take responsibility, then do it for real. Do it with the people you've hurt beside you, and see how it affects them when you throw everything away."

She turned away from him. "Don't talk to me about responsibility." Through the helmet, her voice came out as a cold hiss; beneath it, a second mask, another defence, had clamped down over her features, and inside that burned something dark and deep, the amalgam of all her failings as a scientist, a caretaker, a woman. "You know nothing about what it's like to take that weight on your shoulders. To be the one who keeps it all together. You've never been responsible for the things I have. So don't tell me what to do with that feeling."

"Maybe you're right. Maybe I don't know what it's like to be responsible." Mackie's hands tightened on her hardsuit again. "But I know I don't want you to die!"

"I know," she said. But the decision had already been made. No amount of recriminations from Mackie would sway her course, because this was what it meant to her to be responsible: to take control. Try as she might, as much as it wounded her, she could not separate the two.

She cleared the last few steps to the elevator and pushed a button. `Lockdown system initiated,` said a mechanical female voice. `All exits and entrances will be sealed off for twenty-four hours following this countdown: twenty.` The doors began to close. "I'm sorry." `Nineteen.` The elevator descended, and if there was a protest from above, it was lost in the whirring of the gears.


	11. (Priss) Soul Food

The night wind swept over Priss like a silk glove's caress, the lights of the city cartoonishly bright in her now-augmented vision. She tasted the power lines that thrummed beneath the streets, invisible cords tying the city together, the songs of machines buzzing along their lengths.

Machines. Something she'd always hated, something she never would have wanted to be. But here she was, Priss Asagiri the formerly human, the rocker, the defiant, the Boomer-hater, now Priss Asagiri the machine. The old songs, the drawn-out dirges she'd once screamed over a microphone into the faces of eager fans, the laments for a lost and rotten humanity befouled by Genom's schemes, were dead on her lips. This wasn't what she'd expected. She'd lived in the city, bled in the city, surrounded by machinery: her bikes, her amps, her neon lights, the cancerous excesses of Genom. All of it had been fuel for her music, but she'd never known the machines could sing back. And now that they did, she knew her goal.

The bike that thrummed between Priss' thighs had achieved the secret dream of all bikes everywhere: it had become an extension of the one who rode it. And as it had, it had imparted to her a truth. The modern bike, like more modern technology than Priss had ever imagined, utilised nanomachines. Adding those nanomachines to her systems had pushed back the voice of Largo; it had renewed her failing strength, given her an arsenal with which to fight back. Now Priss, the human, the machine, scoured the streets in search of body shops, bike lots, anywhere she could feast on metal. The key to beating Largo was a tried and true solution, the one Priss had relied on since her childhood days, the only one that had ever seen her through.

More horsepower.

She pulled up by a beat-up Yamaha with foreign plates and a plate surround that read, "I'm a Veteran". _Bet you are, sweetheart,_ she purred, laying a hand on the chrome and feeling her fingers sink beneath the surface. _That's all right; so am I._ The bike leapt to life at her caress, and she felt her brain light up with the influx of data from another mind. Bikes didn't smell or hear or taste, but with the new nanos surging through her body, it felt as if she'd gained another set of senses.

But it wasn't enough. Largo was on the aggressive again, bearing down on her mind, trying to block the new nerve relays from linking up. Somehow she saw it all as if from above, laid out like a game of Go, living, three-dimensional: her forces advancing, his moving to counter, the struggle of power, of life and death. A crucial relay snapped, and he wrenched control of the left side of her body (her body, the bike, the blurred machines), throwing her into a violent skid. Then slowly, steadily, the pressure came, the urging of limbs to act as one, in tandem with a will that wasn't hers: he was turning her around, trying to make her go back to Sylia. She roared in pain, a harsh, metallic sound. _Get **back!**_ The bike spun in circles, two conflicting sets of orders tugging on its frame.

 _Dammit, they said three months! How'd he get so strong?_ She was getting nowhere like this. She needed a different tactic. Unfortunately, the one that came to mind revolted her to the core: let Largo have control for a while, then recoup at the critical moment. It went against all her better instincts, ran up against her most basic nature. Priss had fought many battles, been beaten in some, but one thing she had always resolved was that her enemies would never have her mind. Gangs could beat on her, but she'd never yell uncle. The cops could stomp her into the dirt, but they'd never make her sing their praises. Genom could torture her, but she'd die before she'd sell out her friends. On top of that, she was hardly a Zen master-- she'd never meditated in her life, at least not that she was aware of-- and she suspected that circling around the streets of Megatokyo with a parasite physically and mentally assaulting her was not the best circumstance in which to change that fact. And not having practice with surrendering control of her own faculties, she wasn't sure if she could get it back.

Then again, if she didn't try now, she'd never get another shot. Largo wasn't exactly going to be running her over to Linna's aerobics club every weekend for yoga Sundays, after all. Besides, she told herself, that wasn't exactly true about her faculties: she'd been surrendering them to the drugs for months. If she could make herself push the plunger on a syringe full of narcotics, she could make herself do this. _For Sylia._

Ignoring the protest of her thudding pulse, she struggled to quiet her mind, to stop resisting. _Let go. It's all right,_ she chanted to herself. _Like hell it's all right!_ the rest of her screamed. _You wanna let that psycho take over your brain? You wanna lose yourself to Largo, let him chop up Sylia while you watch? No fucking way are we doing this!_ And she had to admit: it didn't feel all right. It didn't feel good at all. Even now, she could feel him prowling at the edges of her weakened resistance, searching for a way to break in, and the brush of his mind against hers made her want to vomit. With all that remained of her human heart, she wished to God she had her drugs right now. But it wasn't an option. She was going to have to do this on her own.

_Let go. Don't fight it. Let go._

She felt herself slammed into the passenger seat of her own mind, and if the mere suggestion of Largo's presence had nauseated her before, the feeling of him definitively wrenching away the controls made her pray to lose consciousness and never come back. Instead she felt everything, her body moving now of its own accord, a sickening dread building in her gut (or what passed for it) as she watched herself head back in the opposite direction she'd come: straight to Lady's 633. And yet, as disastrous as this idea seemed, it was her chance.

They rounded the corner into the parking garage, heading for the elevator, but Priss had her second wind. With a blast of mental force, she seized back control, shot a cable towards the nearest car and latched on. _Sorry, Sylia. I know you loved the red one._ As it tunneled through the bodywork, a new influx of nanos swept through her system, and she fired another cable at the next car in line, and the next, systematically draining them of their sparks of life. Too late, Largo was fighting back, trying to regain control of the cables, but she had what she needed now. Her body twisted, expanded, a nightmare machine built of humming motors, racing hearts.

 _I'm a supercomputer now, motherfucker. And you're just one more virus. **Die.**_

Exhilaration and triumph flooded her as the nanos swarmed to their target, choking out the systems that kept Largo alive. His nanostructures crumbled, and, bit by bit, their rivals cannibalised them, turning them into defences of their own. Largo's voice faded and died; her head went quiet, a mugginess she hadn't even realised was there lifting from her thoughts. How much he'd been responsible for the things she'd done, she would never know. But at last, she felt at peace.

The sun was slowly coming up, a brilliant corona between the buildings, the sky shifting to an electric shade of blue. She parked up at the garage entrance, a lazy warmth humming through her engine, and watched the sky. Never before had she felt so alive and so strange. She no longer had any sense of how she looked: in all the changes she'd lost track of the boundaries of her body, where the machines ended and the city began. She could feel it all, from the ceaseless rumble of Genom's factories to the flickering streetlight two blocks away from her old trailer, where a panhandler often sat. She'd given him money before, shared her cigarettes and stories of the stage.

She couldn't do any of that now. To any passersby, she was a monster, a machine gone out of control. But it didn't matter. Her time was over, but she'd used the last of it well. Largo was gone. Sylia would be safe. With the last of her strength, she had won.

Her eyes, or something that felt like them, yearned to close. The blue sky faded out, to be replaced by black. _Remember me, Sylia. Remember me._


	12. (Sylia) War Games

_Remember me, Sylia. Remember me._

Sylia's eyes snapped open at the voice. She'd been scouring the city all night and into the morning, and with the nanos that normally helped her stay alert now embroiled in battle with Largo's invaders, she was all but sleepwalking the streets. She knew Mackie was right: she should go home, get rest, get treated. She knew what Priss had been trying to do, and if she'd succeeded, she'd be far from here; if she'd failed, then she'd be dead. Roaming Megatokyo calling her name was a pointless exercise, a sop for her guilt. Or it had been, until that voice.

It was Priss, that much she knew, if less by the sound than by some nebulous measure of feeling. On reflection, she wasn't sure there'd been a sound at all. Just a knowledge without cause, a truth that had settled itself beneath her breastbone and refused all attempts by reason to dislodge it. She'd only experienced such a thing once before: with Mason.

 _Hold on!_ she called out in her mind to Priss. _Don't give up yet! Where are you?_

The sense of presence hovered, ponderous and weary, as if it too were dragging itself from the brink of sleep. Impressions flashed through her mind, tagged with feelings: an image of the Lady's 633 garage that spoke of _home_ , an image of nanomachines that spoke of _victory_ , _satisfaction_. 

The Largo in Sylia screamed out a protest, a howl of incredulity and defiance. _Impossible!_ Pain flashed through her nerves, heavy and hot, and her hardsuit's jets flared to life as her hands clamped down on the controls. She realised what was happening, but too late: Largo spun her around and darted into the street, several lanes of traffic slamming on brakes and blaring their horns. _"Knight Sabers" leader instigates 20-car pileup,_ the headline read in her mind's eye, quickly replaced by _Crazed vigilante pilots "hardsuit" on freeway_ as she saw where Largo was headed.

 _Are you trying to get us both killed?_ she yelled mentally, a car headed for the on-ramp almost barreling into her side. _What purpose does it serve to destroy yourself as well as me?_

A low chuckle came in response, felt in her ribcage rather than heard. _Fool. Do you think the integrity of your flesh and bones means anything to me? I am no man-- I'm information, a virus, a plague! I'm a state of mind, Sylia Stingray!_ Laughter echoed through her bones again, an emotion swelling behind it that she could only describe as gleeful, animal hunger. _Tell me, dear. How does it feel now that I'm a state of yours?_

She didn't feel like giving a response, and in any case all her focus was on wresting back control, throwing herself to the shoulder and out of the traffic. They hit the ground just in time for a tire to whiz by her head, close enough that she saw herself, a flash of blue and silver-green reflected in the hubcap. She rolled her body away from the road; Largo jerked it back, pinning her by the throat with unseen hands. Another car bore down on them, managing to swerve at the last second. It was only a matter of time before one didn't.

 _Priss! I need help!_ Little by little, Largo was forcing her to inch into the road, her hardsuit heels sparking on the asphalt as she fought to dig them in. _If you know how to beat him, get here now!_

Priss startled alert. _Largo? He's still alive?_

 _He's inside me too... he's a virus. Anyone he touches..._ She could feel his presence sinking into the suit, collapsing the metal, the chest cavity crumpling like a soda can. Worse, she could feel in her blood how he revelled in the thought, how much he yearned for this, the ultimate expression of control over a woman who had once been his rival and was now, in his errant imagination, something more. If the cars didn't crush her, her own suit would, and then-- what? _Do you think the integrity of your flesh and bones means anything to me?_

Alive or dead, it made no difference to him. All that was Sylia would be absorbed into Largo, and it would be his. Her memory, her knowledge, even the very structure of her mind, replaced as it had been over the years by an almost completely nanomechanical construct. He could replicate her a thousand times, spawning Boomers with her name and face, running AI simulations of her within the ever-widening network of hardware that was his body. He could do all these things and more, and that she thought of them now was no coincidence. The mind that now hummed in time with hers was only too happy to feed her images of what exactly he planned to do with her, once her will was snuffed out.

He had never wanted to merely kill her. He wanted to own her, wholly and irrevocably. 

_\--Shit. Hold tight, Sylia. I'm on my way._

_Heh. "Hold tight"... only thing I can do, at the moment._ The nanos were spreading through her far faster than she'd planned for. Icy fingers seized her lungs, commanding them not to breathe; she pushed back, but she could feel herself losing. Piece by piece, sense by sense, her body was going numb.

 _Is this what it was like for Priss? All those times I didn't believe her... is this what she was going through? A slow self-destruction that she couldn't control, only watch?_ She wasn't sure if it was the thought or the slow march of the nanomachines through her gut that was making her feel sick. _Perhaps she was right all along. Perhaps this is hell._

The ground beneath her split with a crack. "Good thing I'm a regular visitor," a voice replied out loud. "I know how to skip the lines."

 _Priss?_ She tried to scan for the source of the voice, but her head was still locked in place. She couldn't even manage a shout. Then something slammed into her from below, flinging her into the crash barrier.

"Sorry!"

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something whip up from the ground, a long, dark, snakelike thing. _Buried electrical cable,_ she thought. _But why?_ The cable lashed through the air and landed with a thump by her side. "Grab it!" the voice yelled. "Grab it now!"

 _I can't!_ she thought back, realising whoever it was could hear her. _I can't move my hands!_

"God fucking dammit!" The voice didn't sound like Priss', but it was definitely her vocabulary. "Hang on!"

Something blocked out the light, and then she saw it: perched on the overpass, a stark shape against the sun, towering and mechanical. _A battlemover?_ she wondered, and then it leapt down, her eyes sucking in the scene in slow-mo, hi-def, 16-trillion-colour Boomervision as the nanos crawled up through her tearducts, wriggling around in the jelly of her eyeballs, chewing up her vision and replacing it with his.

It wasn't a battlemover. Not of a factory spec, at least. Its limbs, its torso, were a mishmash of vehicles-- ones she knew well, since most of them had been in her own personal collection. They didn't appear to be bolted together, but instead seemed to blend one into the other, as if someone with a computer graphics program had blurred the edges. It was bright red, not Boomer blue, and had motorcycles for feet, giving it the rather comical appearance of wearing inline skates. Its voice, tinny, androgynous, blasted from shoulder-mounted speakers. The whole thing reminded her of a child's toy: garish, surreal, and strangely charming.

It landed hard in front of her, tires squealing, asphalt groaning beneath its bulk. As it ducked its head, closed its headlamp-eyes against the possibility of blinding her, a single human eye blinked in its chest, wet and fierce, and she saw the final piece of the puzzle. Fused to its torso, one half of her face consumed by the metal, was Priss. Her mouth was stoppered by what was left of the Largo-snake, a bitten-through chunk of metallic spine keeping her jaw forced open, inhumanly wide. Her arms and legs had receded into the creature, and her torso hung, as if crucified, from where they might have been. As far as options for expressions went, she didn't have much left to work with. Yet the gleam in that one eye said it all. In this moment, Priss was alive-- as alive as she'd ever been.

She longed to reach for her, but all her nerves were dead. Instead, the not-battlemover-that-was-Priss knelt by her side, a gentle, mutant giant who slowly moved as if to touch her, but stayed her hand at the last moment.

"Sylia," she said, and Sylia thought she should have found it odd that Priss' mouth didn't move at all, but she didn't. "You know what the cure is. You know how I'm gonna have to fix this. Are you-- gonna be okay with that?"

 _He's killing me, Priss!_ she yelled mentally. It was clear to her now what Priss had done: she'd absorbed more nanos to beat off Largo, and if Sylia wanted to live, she'd have to be absorbed into that system too. She'd have to merge with Priss. Given that the alternative was merging with Largo, it hardly seemed like a choice. _Just do it!_

Largo's voice rose up from Sylia's mouth, her face a mask of horror as he seized her vocal cords. "You're too late anyway! Take all the time you want, you fool! She's mine-- mine-- _mine!_ " At his words, eight arachnoid Boomer limbs tore themselves from Sylia's face, slamming fanglike into the metal of Priss' arm. "I will be the victor! I will have her! I will have this whole city, and Sylia Stingray will be its beating heart! And you, stinking pustule on the face of my design, you will be _annihilated!_ "

"Nice lyrics," Priss replied, and Sylia could feel the jolt of nanos flooding her as their bodies touched. "Shame about the tune. You could go into death metal, maybe." Another jolt ripped through Sylia, agonising and raw, but it was an agony she welcomed: the pains of her body coming back online. "Oh, and I meant the part about the death." Sylia gasped for air, her lungs ignited from within: tears spilled down her face, but she took comfort in the fact that she was feeling them. "Less so the metal. I don't want you inside me. You're kinda gross, yeah?"

"Oh, you may not want this union." Another set of limbs ripped from Sylia's back, and she screamed with all of her newfound voice. "But I think you'll find that Sylia desires it deeply. More deeply than she would even admit to herself." He sank his limbs into Priss, channels of blue Boomer venom snaking through her chassis, stripping her red paint away. Priss howled with pain, and Largo's voice took on a mocking tone. "Isn't that right, dear?"

 _What are you talking about?_ Sylia thought at him, though she felt like she was whispering the words into darkness. She was going under again. Largo was pushing back. _Why the hell would I want her to join with you?_

"Because then we could do whatever we wanted to her," he replied with her voice. "Without that last little shred of what you call a conscience getting in the way."

She could almost feel him breathing down her neck, and with every breath against her skin she felt weaker, less and less present. _Conscience...? No... I don't want this..._ And then it hit her. _Oh. Oh no._ That time in the apartment, when they'd kissed, when she'd pictured in vibrant detail all the ways she could be breaking Priss, twisting her, leaving her mark... but that had been Largo, hadn't it? Her memories, aided by Largo's skilful unpicking of her mind, told a different story.

No, it wasn't the first time she'd thought these things, even if she'd never planned to act on them, never even dared to let them rise to the surface of her consciousness. She'd pushed them down, refused to engage, but they'd been there. And now Largo knew. The things buried in the deepest recesses of her mind, the things she'd never revealed even to herself: he saw them, and he was speaking them aloud, these things that should never have seen the light of day.

"Come on, Sylia, don't play the fool with me. I know your mind as well as you do... and now she does, too," he said, anticipating her next thought. "Yes, she knows exactly why you wanted her. A smart and successful woman like you could buy her pick of seasoned mercenaries... plenty of men and women willing to sell out their integrity for a nice little cash incentive in this day and age. You didn't _have_ to go slumming it for some scuffed-up little street waif. But that's what you prefer, isn't it? The wild mustang, the spirited filly, desperate for a firm hand to set her back on the path to goodness and light."

There was a chuckle in his voice, but not a cruel one. It was worse than cruel: it was sympathetic. It said, _I know how you feel. We're the same, you and I._ She wanted to recoil from it, to separate herself from any suggestion that they could be akin. She didn't want these things, not like that, not in the dehumanizing way that he wanted them. Perhaps she had envisioned them; but she still possessed the capacity to draw a line between her desires and her actions. But he did not, and he wanted them, and as he insinuated himself into her mind it was becoming hard to tell where the boundary between them lay. 

"Took it nice and slow with her, didn't you? Won her trust, got her to where she couldn't give you up without losing everything she'd placed her faith in. What's that saying-- I reject your reality and substitute my own? And you did it so well! Your little vigilante group is the centre of her world now. No matter how she tries to leave, she's tied to you. You're all she's got."

He gripped Sylia's chin in his invisible hand and turned her head, forcing her to look into Priss' face. Not that she needed to see her expression to feel the fear roiling in her gut. Priss' emotions were hers now, as Sylia's were Priss', as Largo's were Sylia's: all three laid bare before each other, an indecent exposure of the soul that only Largo seemed to thrill to. She could feel Priss wanting to look away, to hide from Sylia and from the truth. But he held them both firm. 

"See how she looks at you now. See the naked fear on her face. She's scared that I'm right-- it would destroy her if I were right, because she loves you so much." In her mind's eye, he grinned sardonically. "She needs you now: you've made sure of that. She depends on you. What other choice does she have? No one else would accept her like this." He gestured to Priss' body, in a way that involved no hands or limbs but was intuitive, a gesture of the mind. "You have the power to break her, to bend her completely to your will. Now what are you going to do with that power?"

Her thoughts were sluggish, syrupy; it was a struggle to even get them to form, to remember what the question was, to feel anything but Largo's need and Priss' fear. Each fed off the other, a destructive spiral, and she was a dying flame caught in the middle, being snuffed out between two opposing poles. _I am not Largo,_ she told herself over and over. _I am not his desires. I am not his thoughts. I am myself._ Yet the words increasingly rang hollow, an echo of a thought she'd once had in a dream, with no substance, no connection to reality. She was fighting, she knew that. But what was she fighting for?

"Priss is yours," Largo prompted. "Isn't that right?"

_Yes... that's right. She's mine... but not like you think..._

"And you want to protect her, don't you?" This was a different tack, but her mind was too dulled to comprehend what could be behind it.

_Right. Protect her..._

"Then you have to stop the nanomachines that are spreading through her body. Fight them. With yours." He held out the digital impression of a hand. "Fight with me. Help me save her."

 _Save her._ Who was this man, offering to save Priss? Where was she? It felt like she'd been down here a long time, buried under so much mental sludge. 

"Help is here." His voice was gentle, though on the fringes of her hearing, someone was screaming. "Take my hand. We have to get you out of here."

No longer able to think, she reached out and clasped her hand in Largo's, entrusting herself to his strength.


	13. (Priss) Sin Tax

There was a taste in Priss Asagiri's mouth; a sour taste, like waking up in the morning after regrettable sex. She did not remember where it came from.

There was a sound in her ears, a hollow ringing. It took her a moment to notice what it was: not a sound but its absence, the sound the brain invents when it hears nothing, when breath and heartbeat are gone.

There was a scent on the city air, the smell of nylon threads fused together by fire, of a tired body scraping itself from the asphalt. But the wind didn't blow where she was.

She felt like she must have taken a spill, yet she felt nothing. A sense of weariness in limbs that weren't there, bruises left by unseen blows. She located herself in space through these spots of pain. Or she would have, if there'd been space to locate herself in.

She stared into a blackness that felt like it should resolve, should admit some difference in texture or lighting if she waited long enough. But her eyes fixed on nothing. There was nothing, nothing at all to see.

Absent sight, absent sound, feeling only fear, she remembered the past.

***

_He wasn't a tall man, nor large; in fact he was painfully average. She wouldn't have looked twice at him on the street. But here in this narrow corridor, before a twelve-year-old Priss who had barely hit her growth spurt, the case worker seemed to loom._

_"Where the hell have you been?"_

_She scuffed her sneakers on the old stained carpet, kicking up the smell of stale tobacco. "I was out with my friends. Am I not allowed to do that?"_

_"You're not allowed to be out when curfew says you're not allowed to be out!" He gesticulated at the clock. "Your parents let you run around like some kind of punk?"_

_She followed his finger. The clock read 9:49-- hardly an unreasonable time to still be outside, she thought. "It's not even ten."_

_"This isn't daddy's house any more, little lady. You don't get to go tearin' around the streets like some thug then squeak out of trouble by turning on the waterworks. That don't wash with me."_

_"I'm not crying," she said, straight-faced. But he ranted on as if he hadn't even heard her._

_"I've got a job to do! I don't have the time to be goin' around wipin' you kids' asses!"_

_"I--"_

_"You go around acting like some fuckin' stray dog, you're gonna get what a stray dog gets!"_

_"But--"_

_"So what's it gonna be? You gonna straighten up your back and say, 'yes sir, sorry sir'? Or you gonna stand here sassin' me all night long?"_

_She couldn't believe what she was hearing._ Hell _no she wasn't knuckling to this bastard. "What are you talking about? I'm not sassing you!"_

_"Oh yeah? You wanna go in the fuckin' pound? 'Cause that's what it sounded like to me, kid, sounded like you were sayin' you wanna go in the fuckin' pound, huh?" He lunged forward and snatched her by her collar, pulling her almost off her feet, then turned and began dragging her down the hall. "'Cause that's where we put dogs!"_

_"Get your hands off me!" she yelled, suddenly scared. She tried to pry his hands from her collar, but he just tightened his grip. "Hey, where are you taking me? Somebody help!"_

_"Help?" The world spun around the axis that was Priss, and she hit the wall hard. Her skull rang from the impact, and before she could recover there was the sound of a door opening; one leading to a room whose contents she couldn't see, but which smelt like the janitor's closet at school, chemical and rank. She was grabbed again, hauled close to his face, and he bared his teeth in a vicious grin. "We are the help. Now_ down _, bitch."_

_He shoved, and she fell, backwards into the dark._

***

She gasped for breath, not needing to breathe yet panicking when air didn't come. She knew you couldn't suffocate in a closet, but back then she'd seen too many movies and not enough of life, and the musty, bleach-smelling dark had felt like it was choking her. Now, in this airless, lightless void, choking was a moot point. As the remnant chunks of her body failed and died, nanos would swarm in to replace them, taking over all her basic functions. They already had her heart, her lungs, and she guessed taking a piss or a shit was a thing of the past, what with the not having a lower half. Hell, she probably didn't even need to eat-- which was good, since the last time she'd seen her reflection she'd had a snake in her mouth, a phallic chunk of metal stretching her jaw obscenely.

The image, and the fear, made her want to vomit. She probably couldn't do that either. She couldn't even feel her mouth, her throat, her stomach. She was truly trapped in the darkness now, truly alone, with no telling if it would ever end. Maybe time didn't exist at all here. This had to be hell for sure.

_Should've fucking killed myself when I had a chance. Oh wait. Maybe I did. Maybe that's why I'm here._

Invisible hands reached out to grab intangible hair, closing on nothing. _\--No. Can't put myself through this shit again. Got to pull it together. Got to focus._

But what was there to focus on? There was no way to get her bearings: nothing to see, nothing to hear.

Wait; no. There was something. Faint and distant-feeling, a tug on threads around her heart.

Blood rushed in her ears, and waves of warmth spread over her as the feeling grew. _Sylia?_

She turned all her attention to the pull, the thread. Grabbed on tight, hauled herself up, out of the darkness--

***

\--into technicolor screaming light, roaring voices, howling emotions. The wave of intensity slammed into her, capsizing her mind like a tiny boat, and again she went under. But she strained to focus, and slowly the pieces reassembled themselves.

_Largo. He's doing this. He's got Sylia._

She was about to call out to Sylia, but something pulled her up short: another flash of fear.

_Absolutely not! That's an order!_ _Am I not allowed to do that?_

_...if you want, you have your old job back..._ _So what's it gonna be? You gonna straighten up your back and say, 'yes sir, sorry sir'?_

_...the weapon I couldn't do without._ _Get in the fuckin' pound!_

_...You're just her dog. Loyal weapon. Come crawling back._ _...You're just a dog. Loyal weapon. Come crawling back._

_**You're just her dog.** _

She pushed the images away. _No! That's not how Sylia is!_

"Oh?" A tone like snake oil slithered into her ears, backgrounded by a feminine echo that was painfully familiar. "I think you'll find that's exactly how she is."

"Sylia!" It was her voice she could hear in there, she was sure of it. "Largo! Let her go, you son of a bitch!"

Laughter circled her in stereo, a woman's warm mirth and a man's gloating triumph. "Oh, Priss, Priss, Priss. Silly little pup." She cringed at the use of that word-- which of course Largo knew she would. He'd been inside her, too. _Try not to think about that._ "So easy to blame it on  himme. So easy to pretend you didn't know all along."

"What are you talking about?"

A hand cupped her chin, lifting it. Her senses-- _no, make that sensors, now_ \-- were still screwed up, and it seemed to her like Jackson Pollock had thrown up on Megatokyo, but in the chaos she could make out flashes of silver-green. "Even now you play the innocent. The coy gamine. Denying it even to yourself." The voice smirked dually, distorted by a hardsuit visor, beamed straight into her thoughts. "But then, you know that's how Ishe likelikes it." The hand tightened around her throat, pressing just enough to hurt -- a deliberate act, she knew full well, since the hardsuit could wrench off her head with the flick of a wrist. "The better to watch it all come tumbling down."

_I don't need air,_ she reminded herself. _I don't even know that this is real._ Pain and panic begged to differ. Boomer she might be, but her reflexes were still human, and still beyond her control.

"You know what Ishe saw in you, Priss. You saw it all along. Didn't you ask meher once?" The voice, her own voice, echoed in her head. _"What are we to you, Sylia? What am I? Is this your fetish or something?"_ They laughed. 

She tried to growl but only managed to squeak, spittle dripping down her chin from forced-open lips. _Like a muzzled dog, frothing._ She knew he'd been in her memories, but every time she was reminded, she felt sick to a stomach she probably didn't have. "Get out of my head!"

"I'veShe's been using you from the beginning. You spelt it out to myher face. The Knight Sabers were a farce-- just some dilettante's playthings, pawns in a petty revenge game. Oh, the things the idle wealthy will do to occupy their time." More laughter. "And yet you still believed meher when Ishe told you Ishe loved you. How pathetic can you get? How desperate can you get?"

Their voices cracked, and the hand faltered on her throat. "...How pathetic can I get?"

Priss' reflexes kicked in before her brain, and she took advantage of the moment, grabbing the hardsuit's fingers and wrenching them from her neck. There was a scream, and it was then that her thoughts caught up to her fingers, and all the pieces of the image clicked into place.

One, that she was a Boomer. Not just a human, not just a torso trapped in a suit of armour, but that living armour itself.

Two, that Sylia was now quite small by comparison.

Three, that she'd just almost ripped Sylia's arm off; and on its heels number four, that she was holding Sylia by said arm. The hardsuit's shoulder arced in its socket, connections severed, and the rest of Sylia dangled limply from it. Metallic legs still sprouted from her back and faceplate, now twitching spasmodically, a crippled insect's.

Cold clarity washed over her. This was real. This wasn't Largo playing tricks on her. _Ohshitohshitohshit._

As gingerly as she could, she held out her other hand and lowered Sylia into it. "Shit, shit, no, Sylia..."

Sylia balled up in her palm, a rag doll of a Knight Saber, and coughed. _I'm all right,_ she thought at Priss. _The nanos will fix..._ She let out a thin whine of pain.

Priss knew she was right-- whoever won this battle of wills, their bodies were nigh-indestructible now-- but that didn't make her less to blame. "God, I'm sorry..."

Sylia's head lolled as she struggled to raise it, then gave up. _Why-- sorry...? After what I did..._ She laughed, followed by awful, wheezing, retching sounds. 

Priss looked at her, remembering her words. _...How pathetic can I get?_ That had been Sylia speaking, Sylia alone. The force of her emotion, her guilt, had pushed Largo back for the moment. And in the clarity that came with Largo's weakened grip on them both came the truth, naked, unavoidable.

_Yes,_ came Sylia's thoughts again, sludgy green shame flecked with red pain-splashes. _Everything Largo said-- everything you felt. It's true._

Priss began to make a sound, but what came out of her speakers, quiet and lo-fi, wasn't what she'd expected. "I... I know." The artificial voice sounded hollow; it was easy to believe it wasn't really her own. So tempting, to pretend it never happened. But she had to face facts. "I've always known."

Shock spiked through Sylia, reflected onto Priss. _Then why...? Why did you let me... use you..._

Again, the words came before she realised she'd been thinking them. "Is it... really using me if I let you?" The confusion from Sylia-Largo was clear, and she smirked internally knowing she'd stumped King Asshole too. Her confidence surged, things falling into place faster and faster. "Yeah, I knew. I knew you weren't some kind of spotless angel of justice, that you wanted revenge and you wanted control, and probably somewhere deep down I knew you got off on it too. I knew you thought about how-- how I depended on you, how I was nothing without you, and it made you wanna fuck me even more than you already did." She felt sweat prickle on her skin, felt the back of her throat go dry with the instinct to swallow. "And it fucked me up. It came out every time we bitched each other out, and I felt-- I felt like your whore, I hated you, I hated you for making me weak." A bass rumble underscored her words. "The rest of the time, I didn't let myself think about it."

She looked at herself; at them, at the chewed-up, buckled arc of road they stood in. _The ADP haven't even gotten off their asses yet to block this mess off,_ she thought wryly.

"But you know what? _Whatever._ "

She gestured at the absurdity that was them. Priss, a human half swallowed up by a conglomeration of car parts, an action figure gone horribly wrong; and in the palm of her hand, Sylia, tiny Sylia, the woman who ruled her world. The woman she could crush with one small motion, for all of her sins, and never would.

"Look at us. Look at us, Sylia. Have you ever seen anything so fucking ridiculous in all your life?" The speakers barked out a laugh, high and hysterical. "I'm a fucking junkie with half a face whose only pleasures in life are singing, riding motorcycles, and beating the shit out of people, and I'm pretty sure two out of three of those I'll never do again-- though once I figure out this body I'm gonna rock the _hell_ out of the third." The corner of her mouth quirked up. "You're a desperate rich bitch with a hard-on for revenge and pretty teenagers, which I am totally not any more, sorry, but you know what, we'll work something out. We always do. You know why?"

_Why...?_

"Because we're both screw-ups. We're both full of bullshit. And I take your bullshit 'cause you take mine. That's how they say it in Western style, right?"

_I think that's 'in sickness and in health'._

"Right, whatever. The point is... I love you."

Sylia didn't miss a beat. _Because I made you._

"No. I mean, yeah, maybe. I don't know. The point is that I do, I do love you, even if it isn't real. And... I know you feel the same." She fixed her gaze beyond Sylia, on her own giant fingertips, the way even these hands shook when she said those words. "I felt that too. Not just the bad stuff. I know you love me."

_...Priss. How can you..._

"Forgive me?" She made the speakers make a 'tch' sound. "We've been through this already! I _don't_ fucking forgive you, I think you're a piece of shit sometimes, but dammit, Sylia, I love you and I-- I wanna look _forward!_ " She felt herself choke up, her human vision blurring even as the Boomer saw in perfect clarity. "If we even have anything like a future, I don't wanna give up just 'cause we fucked up! I-- I don't like myself either, Sylia, I really fucking don't, but-- but when I'm with you I feel like maybe I can be _better!_ Yeah, maybe you were sleazing on me, but you know what, you've _done_ shit for me! You weren't perfect, but I'm alive today because you didn't give up!" Her voice was a quivering waveform, a distorted feedback screech. "So-- so stay with me, dammit, don't just leave me with all this! You owe it to me to stay!" A lump of sadness welled in her throat, unswallowed. "Okay?"

She felt a flicker of resolve from Sylia, the impression of a deep breath. _...All right. Let's end this._


	14. (Sylia) Heel Turn

The last thing Sylia had seen had been her hand on Priss' throat, her grip tightening even as she willed it to not. Then the wrench of muscle, ligament, bone-- and static ripped through her brain, swallowing her vision. Only now, as her nanos ran hot in frantic repair efforts, could she lift her head and take in her surroundings.

And what bizarre surroundings they were. She sat in a loose cage of vehicle parts, fused and tangled together like some scrapyard sculpture. For a moment she wondered at the carnage they'd caused-- until the cage moved, and she realised what she was sitting in was Priss' palm. With a gentleness that belied her size-- and everything that Sylia had ever known about her-- Priss was cradling her in her hand.

Even the most charitable description of Priss would allow that she was troubled. That she acted on impulse, lashed out in anger, magnified every bump and glitch in Sylia's well-laid plans and turned them into problems. Yet Sylia had given her nothing but pain -- and Priss had responded with love.

Priss was right. She owed her this.

She forced herself to her knees, to put one foot beneath her and grip onto Priss' fingers. _I will stand._ She pushed and slipped and scrabbled her way to her feet, swaying light-headed from the pain. _I will fight._ The blood beat within her head, within her helmet, the helmet that with countless nanotethers bonding it to her skull she would never again remove. It was part of her now, this skin of her own design. How long had she worn her visor as a mask, a shield from others' judgment? Now this blank face, a superhero's disguise, was her only truth.

A laugh bubbled up inside of her: an awful thing, like something oozing its way up her throat. "Oh, Sylia. Ever the martyr. Do you realize how you sound inside your head?" She tried to grind down on the words, to stop her jaw from moving, her vocal cords vibrating in time to his tune. "Wallow in your guilt, go on -- it'll do you no favours. You're already dead."

_I will fight._

The claws embedded in her face clenched and spasmed, then with a metallic screech more burst free from her arms, her legs, bringing her back to her knees as the claws dug themselves into the metal at her feet, fusing her body further to Priss'. She crouched, an insectoid beast, in the cage of Priss' palm, feeling blood drip down from her facial wounds and onto the inside of her visor.

_I will fight..._

"With _what_?" Largo roared in triumph. "Your body is a factory for my genome! Your mind can only hold out so long when I am the very hardware it rides on!"

"But that's all I need," said Priss, the smirk audible in her voice. "Or had you forgotten about me while you were jerking off to your own monologue?"

Power rushed through Sylia, all her muscles seizing as Largo used her as his battery, firing another salvo of nanos into Priss' palm. But her face showed no pain.

"Don't you think I can see right back into that cesspool you call a mind? You knew you were beaten when I showed up-- no matter how much you had of Sylia you couldn't take me. Believe me, I ran the numbers." She tapped the battlemover's head with a massive finger. "Your only chance was to fuck with our heads. Distract us. Keep us off-guard. But you made the mistake of thinking we think like you." Her headlamps flashed, a data-modem pattern. "Unlike you, I can handle the truth."

"Truth?" Largo spat the word through Sylia's lips, twisting her face into a horrid snarl. "What do you understand of her _truth_ , flesh-worm? How dare you lay claim to that which _you do not comprehend?_ "

Priss laughed darkly. "Is that really what this all comes down to, Largo? A pissing contest over your deflated manhood?" Bringing them close to her human face, she stared directly into Sylia's eyes, and through them, into the presence of Largo at her core. "I'll give you one little piece of advice, shithead. In the world of relationships, 'comprehending' a woman kinda takes second place to, you know, maybe respecting her bodily autonomy?" Sylia could feel her blood flowing faster now, as if spurred by the rage in that single red eye, her nanos fiery and alert, Largo's faltering. "Eat shit and die."

Something white-hot and horrible lanced through Sylia, and she clung to Priss' massive hand with all the strength she had, riding out the pain. Slowly, eventually, it burned away, melting like her body was melting: no tension holding it together any more, no fear, no stress. She was a puddle in the palm of the hand of the Buddha, and the Buddha was a giant robot with the soul of Priss Asagiri, and that made absolutely no sense _whatsoever_ but what the hell, it didn't matter, nothing was supposed to make sense when you were dying.

 _Except you're not dying,_ Priss' voice echoed in her mind. _We were kinda trying to prevent that, remember? Also, I'm not the Buddha. I think I might be getting the hang of that whole Zen thing, though._

 _I don't know,_ Sylia mused groggily. _"Eat shit and die" is not a very Zen statement to make._

_Hey, I said I was_ getting _the hang of it._

Inside their minds, Largo howled his rage, now a fading, impotent thing. _This is my city! This is my destiny! Sylia Stingray will never be yours!_

 _No, she won't,_ Priss shot back. _But she won't be yours, either. She's not anyone's. She belongs to herself._

 _A noble sentiment,_ Largo hissed. _Coming from someone who has no 'self' to speak of._

_Oh? And you do? At least I've still got a body. You're just a dying parasite._

The faintest strains of laughter echoed through their heads. _But that's the beauty of it. I'll never die, as long as there are hosts. You'll never know how many things I've touched... how many things I've infected... Give me time, worm. I'll rise again._

With that last challenge, Sylia felt Largo's grip on her fail completely. Her own thoughts rushed back in, tendrils reaching up towards the light, a light that was Priss. At the edge of her consciousness their thoughts sparked and duelled, then surrendered to an easy harmony, a snug fit.

It was astounding. Now, her thoughts clear, she grasped the magnitude of what they had done. Priss was no longer separate from her, but a perspective she shared, a voice of conscience inside her own head.

The reply was instant, a part of her thoughts. _Don't you mean the devil on your shoulder?_

 _Oh, because I'm the angel,_ said Sylia wryly, though she already knew what the response would be.

_Nah, we're both devils. On each other's shoulders. Actually, I think technically you're on mine right now._

It only then occurred to Sylia that she hadn't known where she was, not for quite some time. She opened her eyes, bracing for vertigo, unsure of where her vantage point was going to be. Indeed, it took her a few moments to orient herself; but she eventually worked out that she was looking out from somewhere within the robot's cranium, such as it was. Experimentally, she tried shifting her thoughts, looking out from Priss' eyes instead: her one remaining human one, and the complement of sensors that flanked it.

 _Whoa,_ thought Priss as they switched back. _That was weird. ...Do it again._

Sylia laughed and obliged. _Fitting. I'm the head and you're the heart. I don't suppose you had a hand in this?_

_Nope, wasn't me. Though it does sound like a lyric. Speaking of, do I still get to see your poetry?_

Shooting Priss a look wasn't quite the option it had once been, but she made do with a mental image. _We're fused together in a battlemover made out of our collective vehicles, and you're still thinking about that?_

Priss offered the impression of a shrug. _Just trying to keep the mood light,_ she said, and Sylia felt her heart lurch. It took her a moment to realise that the emotion hadn't come from her, but from Priss. In fact, it probably hadn't originated in anything near the vicinity of her actual heart, assuming she still had one. _I could kill for a cigarette right now,_ they thought in synchrony.

Priss chuckled. _Hey, get this snake out of my mouth and I'll go raid us a convenience store._

_Absolutely not! We are not common hoodlums, no matter how we may look. We're protectors of the peace._

_Oh yeah. Protectors of the Megatokyo freeway system, that's for sure. Wonder how much we've fucked up everyone's commute._ The roar of jet engines caught their attention. _Shit. I think the cops just found us._

Sylia, back in the cockpit now, turned their head. _No... not the police. Look._ The auxiliary sensors swivelled, and brought into focus the distant shapes: two airborne hardsuits, one pink and one green, and on the street below, the Silky Doll's truck.

 _You didn't bring the truck?_ Sylia quipped.

 _No,_ said Priss. _I did not bring the truck._

_Why on earth not? With all the equipment we keep in there, it's practically an armoury of nanomachines!_

_Geez, and how was I supposed to know that?_

_Use your head!_

The hardsuits got there first, Mackie struggling to weave through backed-up traffic. Sylia wasn't even going to ask how he got out. She'd known that all she could do was stall him. He was no less a genius than she was, after all; he just lacked the willpower to use what he'd been given, at least most of the time. And any time Sylia was involved was when he usually made exceptions.

She'd known he'd call the others, too. What she hadn't expected -- though she knew that she should have -- was that the two hardsuited women didn't look like they were on the same page. Nene, who never led the pack, was outpacing Linna, who dodged back and forth around the wake of her jets, as if trying to cut her off. But Nene streaked ahead, all power to her thrusters, afterburners glowing blue and shuddering.

Something pulsed in Sylia's head, a dim yet nagging alarm. _Mackie...?_ She focused on the tender spot in what felt like her skull, bringing it to her nanos' attention. They swarmed on it, and what had once been her hardsuit's comm link, now inseparable from her brain, fizzed and sputtered to life.

Mackie came online. _"--lia! You've got to--"_

But the rest of his words were lost to static, as Nene Romanova, most reticent of the Knight Sabers, aimed her mag-gun at Sylia and fired.


	15. (Priss) Soft Drug [E]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter, we bump up the rating. Because plot demanded porn, apparently. It's usually the other way around...
> 
> At the same time, a lot of the plot is here! If you're not looking for smut, then you can probably skip after Sylia's big confession. She's doing a lot of those lately.

As the neural network reeled with the blow, the inside of Priss' head went quiet. In just a few hours she'd become accustomed-- frighteningly so-- to sharing a mind with Sylia. Now all that was gone.

She'd lost so much in so short a time. Her autonomy, her humanity, her grip on reality-- and very nearly, her life. She wasn't sure if none of that compared to losing Sylia's constant presence, or if it was just the last burden she could bear. But something inside her snapped.

She could hear Linna begging Nene to stop, screaming the things she would have screamed-- "Get a hold of yourself! They're not the enemy! That's Priss and Sylia in there!" But the part of her that might have reasoned with Nene had gone when Sylia had gone, followed her into that greyness, and what was left was purely instinctual: a red, shrieking, animal fear.

She tried to scream herself, but it was like her throat was cut. The speakers were dead, her mouth stoppered up. Finally, impotent and distraught, foam oozing from the sides of her mouth and down her chin, she ground her teeth against Largo's snake-carcass with Boomeroid strength, biting the awful thing in two. She spat out the remnants in disgust, then bared cracked and bloodied teeth as she readied another cry. But there was no air in her lungs, _there were no lungs,_ only a hollow in her chest where nanos crawled and a Boomer life support system pulsed, precise and alien.

Her voice was gone. Sylia was gone. She couldn't move. And Nene was going to kill her.

"Priss is dead!" Nene screamed, firing over and over, though the shots had all been useless after the first. "She's dead! You're not her! You're a monster!" The trembling in her voice struck a familiar note, the sound of someone teetering on the brink of reason, but she couldn't follow the thread. There was lightning in her brain, her nerves unravelling, her jaw working uselessly. Part of her wanted Nene to end it for her, just to have it be over. There was nothing left worth saving here.

"You monster!" Nene's voice was choked by sobs, strained and thin and on the verge of giving out. "You monster! What have you done with her? What have you _done_ with her? _What_ "-- a gasp --" _have_ "-- gasp --" _you_ "-- gasp-- " _done?_ " She roared the last word, a _duaaaaagh!_ that lost its articulation halfway through, a breathless battle cry that ended with a lunge at Priss' throat.

She was trapped in her dead metal cage, her body held cruciform for the slaughter, only able to thrash uselessly as Nene rushed her. Instinct kicked in and she shook her head _no_ , eye screwed shut, her mouth moving in a silent plea for mercy.

The world went dark with a ringing _slam_ as metal hit metal, a sound she hadn't expected to hear. Warily, she opened her eye to see... a whole lot of nothing, really; but from the distant prickling in her nerve relays she could tell the battlemover's arms were flung in front of her, blocking Nene's blow.

"Fire restraints! _Now!_ "

Sylia's voice washed over her, and with a pneumatic hiss something was fired from the Silky Doll truck, something that clanged harmlessly against Priss' chassis. The arms lowered and Priss could finally see the battlefield as Sylia yelled another order, another salvo of cables that Nene dodged--

\--straight into a gut punch from Linna, smoke from the knuckle bomber's charges hazing the air. Nene staggered forward and slumped, winded, to be caught by Linna's arms. Even in the hardsuit, Priss thought, that had to have hurt.

"I'm sorry," gasped Linna, clearly stunned by her own actions. "I didn't know how else..."

"You did what you had to." Sylia's tone was business as usual, but there was a heaviness in it that said she was getting extremely weary of them _having to_. "Good work, Linna."

"I've got her," said Mackie, leaping out of the truck with a pair of shackles in hand. Rigid and over-large, as they were cuffed around Nene's hardsuit wrists she realized they had to be made to fit a suit, that Sylia had to have planned for something like this. It only faintly surprised her, at this point. She wondered if, after today, she'd have capacity left for surprise any more.

 _...After today._ Sylia was here, and the future felt real once again. Slowly the relays were coming back online, and a sense of calm washed over her: a euphoria she knew well. Addiction, sated.

She should have been worried about that, she knew; should have been worried about poor Nene, who was now being loaded into the truck, arms locked behind her back, her head lolled to the side in a dead faint. On some level, she was. But what she mostly felt, other than relief, was exhaustion. The sun was coming up between the skyscrapers, on what day she didn't know. But it felt like lifetimes since she'd slept, and she wanted so badly to put her head down and just _rest_.

 _Can we go home now?_ she pleaded with Sylia. _The ADP can clean this up, can't they?_

Sylia's words were a warm blanket, the softest touch inside of her thoughts. _Yes. We can go home._

***

There had been no easy way for them to put down their heads. Neither of them would be sleeping in Sylia's bed any more. But they'd at least managed to get the Boomer horizontal-- with some help from Mackie, who, to his credit, had not made a single joke about "getting Priss and Sylia horizontal". Sylia had spouted some technobabble at Mackie that she hadn't followed and didn't want to think about, but otherwise the mood had been somber, strained, as everyone tried to avoid bringing up recent events.

Now they lay in the dark, in the quiet chill of Sylia's garage, and Priss couldn't take one more moment of it. Ever since the battle, a single thought had been circling her mind, like a fish trapped in a bowl. She blurted it out.

"What would you have done if Linna hadn't punched Nene out?"

"Hm?"

"I just-- I couldn't stop thinking about it. How you had those cuffs in case any of us went berserk. Like you'd thought about it. What were you gonna do when the restraints didn't work?"

She could feel Sylia thinking about it, a cloudy mass of concepts that she prodded and poked into the shapes of words. "Electromagnetic pulse. Same thing she used on us. It works on the hardsuits just as well."

Priss ran her tongue over her teeth, contemplating. She still couldn't speak from her throat, the nanos apparently not considering this essential, but they'd rushed to replace her broken teeth with something they found more fitting: a set of bestial fangs, metallic and cruel. "What if that didn't work either?"

The words came out calmly, but she could tell exactly where the rebuff began, the wall Sylia put up around herself. Even now she could conjure it, a clammy fog encircling her. "You want to know if I'd kill her. If I'd give the order."

She didn't know that was what she'd been asking, but it was. "Yeah."

"If it were necessary... yes." Sylia sighed out static. "You had to know that when you signed up. The code of the Knight Sabers... I wasn't exactly subtle."

Priss let out a nervous laugh. "I always thought that was a joke."

"No wonder you never obeyed any of it."

There was no anger in Priss' tone, just surprise. She was past anger. This whole thing had just blurred into a nightmare, a psychedelic hellscape she couldn't make sense of. "But... seriously. That was your plan? To kill us if we didn't conform?"

Another sigh. "I was... naive, then, when I began the Knight Sabers. I didn't realize what I would end up feeling for all of you."

"Shyeah, 'naive' is one word for it." It was an understatement for sure-- and yet it struck her then how fitting it was. For all that she was the grand poobah, the genius, Sylia really didn't understand anything about people. She wasn't sure if she found it endearing, pathetic, or a little of both.

"Let me ask you a question."

Priss hadn't expected that, but she acquiesced. "Okay. It's honesty hour, then." Yeah, _Things To Do When Stuck In A Mobile Suit With Your Lover_ : play truth or dare.

"How were you planning to kill yourself?"

Priss winced, but rolled with it. _Ask a slap-in-the-face question, get a slap-in-the-face question, I guess._ "I... was gonna go away. Somewhere you wouldn't find out what happened to me." She scoffed at her own naivete. "Yeah, I know. You'd probably have showed up right at whatever melodramatic city vista I'd picked to go out staring at."

Thinking about it, remembering what she'd planned, made her throat close up and made her falter, but Sylia's thoughts gently urged her on. "I had-- I wasn't using back then, but I knew where to get it. Had enough dope on me to go out feeling like I'd just played a sellout gig at the Tokyo Dome." She laughed somberly. "I'd barely feel it now, but back then... OD on that shit, you stop breathing. All peaceful-like." She could feel Sylia frowning at her, but she kept going. "Just pull up on some overpass. Me and my bike. Didn't wanna..." Thoughts of Sylvie, of Sylia, welled up unbidden. "...go out alone."

Though most of her real flesh was gone, she felt a warmth press around the illusion of her body, the impression of an embrace. For an instant, it almost felt like she was whole.

Habit clamped down on the tears, thickened her throat with the urge to swallow, but there wasn't much point in pretending. Sylia felt it all, and for a while she just let herself surrender to that, curled up against the machine-ghost of Sylia, her body quaking with hollow, breathless sobs. Servos whirred quietly in the dark, and a large hand came up to cover her, to cup her close against the battlemover's chest. Not that she could be anywhere else; but she wished she could cling to that hand, hold it closer still, and even as she did she felt its finger brush her cheek, the delicacy of Sylia's touch gloved by cold steel.

When she had cried herself out-- after Sylia had dried her tears with a jacket hanging from the wall, then spread it over her to let her hide her shame, her puffy face and gruesome teeth-- she spoke again. Her speaker-voice was loud and startling in the vast space, not muffled by the jacket as she would have preferred, though it flanged and wobbled erratically.

"...How long had you been watching me before we met?"

Again Sylia turned the words over in her mind before she spoke. "A while," she eventually said, noncommittally. "I had eyes on the rougher wards of the city because I knew that was where people hurt by Genom wound up. One of my contacts told me about a speed tribe who was drawing a reputation down in Ota. The leader was nothing special, he said, but his partner was _de facto_ running the show. She had... hmm... what was it he said?"

"No sense of self-preservation and a killer left hook?"

Sylia laughed. "Something like that. Actually I think it was 'an extremely dogged attitude, for someone so young'. Whatever the challenge, you held on tight and wouldn't let go until someone was down. And it was usually the other guy."

Priss did her best mental impression of a smirk.

"So I came to see what you were all about. And-- I meant what I said back then; I was impressed. You were unrivaled in street combat, and it was all authentic- none of those flashy moves that would never work in a real fight. I watched you go up against a rival, lose, and come back to use every one of his techniques against him, better than he ever had. You learnt on your feet.

"...You were also undisciplined, reckless, and about to die young. I couldn't let you waste your life in some meaningless gang fight. But you were stuck on that man, and nothing I said would have changed that. I had to wait."

A chill hung over the room as, slowly, they both realized the implications of Sylia's words.

"You had... to wait," said Priss, carefully. "Wait for what?"

She could feel Sylia trying to backpedal, while also knowing it was hopeless. The fear that flooded them both told Priss everything she needed to know.

"You waited... for him to die." Sylia gave the tiniest flicker of affirmation. Priss could feel her face contorting, taking on the cold pallor of shock. "How did you know?" No response. " _How did you know?_ "

The words projected, disembodied, out into the room, but Priss could see the image of Sylia's face, tight and closed. "I kept tabs on everything, Priss. I was watching you and I was watching Genom, and I knew what they had on him. It wasn't something they would just let go. It was-- only a matter of time."

"A matter of _time_?" Priss echoed. "And you didn't use this _time_ to warn us because...?"

"You must have known," said Sylia weakly. Priss could tell it sounded weak even to her, and she was about to call bullshit when Sylia did it first.

"No, you know what? Those days are over-- the days when I could feed you a line and make you eat it. You already know the truth." Priss was simmering with anger, but she'd been thrown off guard, so she listened. "I needed you-- take that any way you will, it'll be the truth-- and I wasn't willing to let you go. The only way you'd ever get out of that life was if I stood by and let Genom do what Genom was going to do. _So I did._ " The words slammed down with finality. "Are you happy now?"

"No." Priss' voice was a whisper.

"No, well, you shouldn't be. Everything I sold you, everything the Knight Sabers stood for-- it was a lie. I stood before you and promised you with one hand the justice I took from you with the other."

She said it so simply, so matter-of-factly that it sounded rehearsed, and Priss cracked. "I hunted for so long-- I shook down every petty thug in Megatokyo looking for the bastard who murdered him! And you're telling me that all along it was you! I should've killed you the first day I met you! Everything in me was screaming I should fucking run you through and I should've listened, I should've twisted that knife in your guts when I had the fucking chance, you son of a _bitch_!"

"You probably should have," agreed Sylia.

"Oh, don't you play the fucking martyr now! You think that makes things _okay_? 'Yes, I did it, I killed your lover to get to you'--"

"I didn't _kill_ him--"

"As good as! You let him walk into Genom's trap while you sat and watched-- fucking _Genom_ , man! We were supposed to be taking them down!"

"Running an organization like the Knight Sabers-- there are trade-offs that have to be made--"

"Spare me your high-minded bullshit! A man is _dead_! A death _you_ could have prevented, a death it was _our duty_ to prevent! Isn't that what we fought for, Sylia? For the victims of Genom?" She made a noise of disgust. "Or just for the ones you want to screw?"

Faster than flashfire, Sylia turned. "You are going too far!"

"Oops, puppy's been a bad girl," she snapped back. "No fucking biscuit, huh? What you gonna do about it, princess? Slap me? Punch me while I'm down, give me a few broken ribs so you can make it all better? Or no, wait, you could"-- her voice was high with laughter --"you could make me a machine, just like you! A monster just like you! Then we'd never be apart! Wouldn't that be fun?

"God, Sylia!" In her mind, the hands she would have had clutched at her hair, clawed at her skin. "I did this for _you_! I turned myself into this for you, to save your pathetic, sorry ass! You have my body, you have-- you have my mind! I'm never gonna be able to _think_ again without you knowing it, in every tiny fucking detail!"

"That's not true. You can shut me out if you want to. Try it."

"Oh, and you won't just look anyways? You won't just rip open my mind so you can get off to the fact that even when you've screwed me over every way you _possibly_ can, I'm still gonna be jerking off to the thought of your face?"

Sylia flicked through emotions like a radio scanner: shock, pain, interest. "That is... franker than I expected from you, given the circumstances."

"There's no point in being anything else! You'd know anyway!" Her voice was on the edge of hysterics, distorted and overamped, spilling all over the frequency range. She tried to claw back some sort of control, to stop feeling the complex, ugly mess of things she was feeling, to focus her anger enough to burn out desire.

She was not going to stoop to this. She was not going to let this conversation, this of all conversations, end like this.

She was a filthy liar.

"...dammit. God dammit." She was shaking. "What are you trying to do to me?"

"I'm doing nothing," said Sylia, and if it was coloured by need then it was also honest and raw and enticingly vulnerable. "Actually, I think you started it."

Priss wanted to hide her head in her hands, but she couldn't. She wanted to storm out of there and go somewhere, anywhere she could get some goddamned peace, where she could jerk off to the thought of shoving Sylia against a wall and grabbing her hair in her hands and shaming her like she'd shamed Priss. Make her weak like she'd made Priss-- slide her hands up under that tight little pencil skirt, run them up and down her thighs until she was trembling, begging, trying to grind into Priss' touch. But she'd keep moving her hands away, letting them wander almost to her panties -- some lacy little thing she'd designed herself, straddling the line between sweet and sexy until Priss made mockery of that pretense, teasing the spots where silk met skin until they were soaked through with her need. She'd be able to see Sylia quivering through the fabric, see every throb of her clit against sheer wet silk, how each beat of her heart made them brush each other and made Sylia cry for release.

But Priss would never let her. She'd have Sylia's hands bound, useless like hers had been; maybe spread her legs and shackle them like that, leaving her wanton and exposed, unable even to press her thighs together to stop the ache. She'd be completely at Priss' mercy, and Priss wouldn't give her any-- in fact, yes, this was perfect, she'd unzip her own pants, the clinging leather she knew Sylia loved, and start stroking herself right there, doing everything to herself that a traitorous part of herself still wanted to do to Sylia. She'd imagine she was getting Sylia off, taking her time, wetting her fingers with her tongue and circling her clit until her knees buckled and shook, bringing herself to the very edge only to back off. She'd play with Sylia a little just to keep her in the game, keep her wet and trembling as Priss touched herself again, careful because she was so close; just looking at Sylia might make her come, bound there so helpless, lips parted, panting small shallow breaths as she tensed every muscle in her body trying, failing, to push herself over the edge. She wanted to come looking into Sylia's eyes, to let her know she was the true victor; but every stroke felt better knowing Sylia was denied it, and the urge to draw this out, to not give in, was...

Exhilarating. And framed in terms that woke her like a slap, a splash of ice water that left her reeling. _The true victor? What the fuck am I saying?_

"Sylia... th-this isn't me..." Her mouth still dry, her blood pounding, she struggled to claw her way back to normalcy. "Largo... he's still here."

"Shit!" Sylia's nanos jolted alert. "Full system scan, now!" Priss begrudged her the compliment, but she couldn't help but be impressed at how much Sylia could do with the body after barely a day. "No... no... oh God."

"What? Let me look!" Whatever Sylia saw she couldn't; not that she would have understood it anyway, but she loathed being out of the loop.

"There's nothing here. We're clean-- as clean as we get." Sylia's voice was hollow. "Which means if you've absorbed something of Largo... it's in your personality, now. You've been altered."

Priss wondered how many last straws it would take before she snapped and murdered this woman. "You. Are. Fucking. Shitting me." She didn't need a mindlink to know that Sylia was not, in fact, shitting her.

"If it helps, I'm... probably affected too."

Priss started to laugh. And laugh. The speakers squeezed out a fractured sound, and her chest rose and fell with the memory of breath. She laughed until she felt sure she would choke, until her muscles seized and she wanted to vomit, until the laughter turned to tears and back to laughter again, until she could no longer tell which was which.

"Screw this. Just, screw it, I'm done, I don't even know any more, Priss Asagiri has left this fucking building." She couldn't stop laughing, couldn't stop convulsing. "I am so... so past understanding what my life has become. What we are, what I am, what I'm even fucking doing here. I am so past thinking, Sylia. I am so past caring!"

She let out a sob like a beast's wail. Her chest felt like it was on fire, like at any moment she might just crumple up, collapse in on herself like one of those stupid science-fair experiments. Hot water in a plastic bottle. Dunk it in ice. The whole thing caves, a testament to the power of air pressure. The cabin was depressurizing. She was going down.

She could feel Sylia wanting to comfort her, and she didn't have it in her to fight back. Who else would she turn to anyway? Sylia was the world now: everything she hated, everything she loved. Alpha and fucking omega, just like she'd wanted.

Her vision narrowed to that one face, to the centre of her world. Feeling soft warmth surround her, shivering like she was sick-- _it's exactly the fucking same,_ was her last thought, _just like shooting dope_ \-- she blacked out, and stayed out, cold.


	16. (Sylia) Split Soul

The comm link in her head pinged, and a weak, bleary Sylia found herself fumbling towards consciousness, quite against her better judgment.

_"--Sis?"_

"Mackie." She sounded like she felt: on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The catnaps she'd fluttered in and out of hadn't done anything to take the edge off her self-hatred. "This had better be good news, or so help me."

_"Uh, yeah, it is... also, no offence, but um, you sound like you and Priss just went ten rounds. And she won. What happened?"_

"Priss and I went ten rounds, and she won," Sylia deadpanned.

_"Oh."_

She sighed, her synthetic voice trembling. "She hates me, and she has every reason to."

_"What... did you do to her?"_

Sylia laughed a laugh that was almost a sob. "What didn't I do to her?"

 _"I dunno, sis."_ Mackie's voice was careful, gentle, testing the edges of Sylia's wounds. _"You could tell me about it?"_

"Later." She might as well talk to Mackie. He'd be all she had, once Priss left her. And Priss would leave, she'd make sure of it. "How's Nene?"

 _"She's holding up. Linna's been taking her calls, trying to keep the ADP out of the loop. Making sure she doesn't flip out again, that sort of thing. She's been a real trooper."_ He paused. _"They'd probably both be doing better if they knew more about what was going on."_

"Good. Tell them I'll be over there when I can." She ignored the last comment. "So what's the status with the nanos?"

_"Ready to go when you guys are. Uh, Sylia?"_

"What?" Patience was not in her arsenal this morning. Or afternoon, or whatever it was. She hadn't even bothered to check.

_"Is Priss... there?"_

"Of course she's there. Where else would she be?"

_"No, I mean... She's not conscious, is she? She hasn't agreed to any of this."_

"Mackie." Her tone was a warning.

_"Did you put her out?"_

"She went out on her own. The nanos are keeping her down until we get this mess resolved, until we're in our own bodies--"

 _"--Sis, you're an idiot!"_ There was the sound of a fist hitting a workbench. _"After everything that's happened-- you're sitting there lamenting about all the times you screwed up, and you're going to do this without asking if that's what she wants?"_

"She'll say no."

_"Then why--"_

"Mackie!" The first time had been a warning; now it was a threat. "I am not. Going to keep feeding her this poison. I am not going to keep torturing this woman I claim to love, she's better off _without--_ "

 _"She needs to decide that, not you!"_ Mackie was almost screaming. _"You haven't learned a damn thing!"_

"She doesn't know what she wants!" Sylia screamed back. "I did this to her! I used her, manipulated her, _broke_ her, and now she's stuck to me, this-- _symbiote,_ who hates my guts but can't stop wanting me!"

The ferocity, the frankness of her words shocked Mackie silent. "I feel everything she feels. She feels everything I feel. Do you know what that's like?" Mackie didn't make the obvious joke, so she made it for him. "Pretty good, right? That's probably what you think. Well, you're right. It feels incredible. We could spend the rest of our lives in a feedback loop, knowing exactly what each other wants, and she would never, ever want to give it up. I'm a shot of dopamine to her brain. I'm everything her strung-out, junked-up little mind needs. She might even stop hating me, with time. Conditioning. Her instincts learning I'm the hand that feeds, like Pavlov's goddamned dog.

"But it wouldn't be _her_! I'd just be pulling her strings like I always have, telling her what to think, what to feel! And some part of her would always resent me, and that part of her would be locked up inside, screaming to get out, and she'd never--" She let out an ugly, choked sound. "She'd never be free, Mackie. If there's one thing I know Priss wants, deep in her heart, it's freedom. And I've done nothing but fetter that." Her words were firm. "I have to let her go."

 _"You'll regret this,"_ said Mackie softly. But he closed the comm link, and she knew he was coming.

She spoke to dead air. "I already do."

***

Sylia and Mackie's plan was simple, by Stingray standards. With Largo destroyed, the vast amounts of nanomachines in their systems had turned to rebuilding and optimizing, devouring damaged cells one by one and replacing them with themselves. A machine's definition of "damaged", however, was questionable when it came to mortal life; the Priss and Sylia who remained were ships of Theseus, their human cells entirely replaced with nanomechanical copies.

Theoretically, then, though all the nanos could communicate with each other, each one was a fragment of either Sylia or Priss. If the nanos that made up each person could be isolated, and injected into cloned bodies, then they would come to colonize their new hosts-- and Priss and Sylia would be separate, and whole, once more.

From the head of the battlemover, Sylia looked down on her soon-to-be body. Effectively brain dead, it lay in a cocoon of life support machines, its modesty covered by a simple sheet. It looked pale and small from so far away, and strangely inhuman. She wondered if she'd ever looked like this to Priss when she slept.

In the bay next to it, of course, was Priss. She was almost certainly projecting, but she could swear that even like this-- comatose and having never known life-- she looked more vibrant than Sylia, more real, as if she could wake at any moment. She briefly caught herself thinking, _why wake her at all?_ ; she would never be more at peace than in this moment, free of the traumas with which life, and Sylia, had burdened her. Was dragging her back into this wretched world, to deal with it all over again, really a kindness?

 _No_ , she told herself firmly. That was no different from killing her, from deciding her life ended here. She couldn't help wishing she'd at least given her some neurological tweaks: something to blunt those self-destructive impulses, to keep her from falling straight back into her addictions as soon as she was out on her own. But that, too, would have been meddling. She had to stop thinking of Priss as someone whose future she could shape and mould. She had to let her go.

Besides, she thought ruefully, it wasn't like she'd tweaked away her own flaws, either.

She sighed and let her sensors close, trying to prepare herself for the transition by picturing herself back in her body. It was harder than she'd expected, given she'd been in her own for over two decades and this one for little more than a day. Even with Priss deep under, her presence, like a heartbeat or a softly hummed song, suffused everything. She didn't need hands to reach out and touch her, to lace her fingers with Priss' and feel the calluses there, where at the tip of each finger the softness of youth yielded to nights of passionately played guitar. Once Priss might have touched her with such hands: rough and smooth, dancing over her lips, across her jaw. She would never do that now. Her hands would never lie within reach, eager to entwine.

She squelched the thoughts, swallowed, made herself remember how to breathe again. Air, not Priss, not a shadow of hope, was the thing in her chest that would keep her alive.

Diving beneath her consciousness, she prepared to breach the surface of her other self.

***

Sylia woke up feeling like she'd drowned.

Her head was hammering, her lungs on fire, a metallic taste in the back of her throat. She tried to look around, but as she turned her head the world pitched violently, and an empty stomach clenched and pleaded with her brain that it had nothing to throw up _so would you please stop asking?_. It didn't look like she was poolside: the stark fluorescence, the blinking lights, suggested she was in the medical wing.

_Where am I...? What happened to me...?_

Frantically, she tried to reconstruct the last few minutes, but her thoughts kept slipping, jumbling. Her heart rate spiked; if there was one thing that struck fear into Sylia, it was not being able to think straight.

"Mackie?" she called out, or tried to; her voice felt like she hadn't used it in a month, and it came out more like _Muhuh?_ "Priss? What happened?"

A dark blur fell over her vision, the right height and hair colour to be Mackie. His words faded in and out, as if her ears were still waterlogged: "...told you... ...be some memory loss... ...up in a few..."

"Hnh?"

"I said it should clear up in a few minutes. I don't wanna alarm you, but there's something odd about the readouts. Yours seem to be stabilizing, but Priss..."

"Priss?" She turned her head, fighting the dizziness, to see an auburn-haired figure on the gurney next to hers, struggling to sit up. Buried instinct flared, and she reached out to her-- then jerked back, a cold shock like ice water crashing over her, plunging her head-first into memory.

  
_Priss._ I killed him.  
I did this. _\--just like a drug--_ _"God dammit, what are you trying to do to me?"_  
_Alpha and fucking omega._ "--there are trade-offs--"She hates me.  
_"To save your ass!"_  


Her eyes darted in search of Mackie's. "What's wrong with Priss?"

Priss groaned theatrically, then coughed. "God," she rasped. "M'feel like shit... wha'appened?" She looked over to the source of all the noise. Her eyes were unfocused, and she was clearly having the same trouble speaking as Sylia; but as her own vision cleared, seeing her alive and _intact_ made Sylia's throat tighten with emotion.

"We get wrecked? Boomer...?" Priss was reading the look on Sylia's face, and clearly mistaking it for something else. "Shit... Nene? Linna?"

"They're all right," Mackie cut in. "Nene's still under observation... Linna's with her. They're safe."

Priss let out a breath. "'S good." She looked to Sylia, brows furrowed in inquiry. "Sylia? Y'okay?"

 _In a few moments,_ she reminded herself, _she'll remember how much she hates me. She'll remember that she was a Boomer and Nene tried to kill her and she's not here because we screwed up our fight, she's here because I screwed up her life._ But right now the earnestness in her eyes, her voice, was almost too much to bear. _Has she always looked at me like this? Or am I just seeing what I want to see?_

Priss pushed up and off the gurney, wrapping the sheet around herself like it was a towel, and sat down next to Sylia. "Hey." She reached out to touch Sylia's cheek, clumsy and faltering. "You... cryin'? Shit..."

The shock was evident all over her face: her mouth slightly open as she chewed the corner of her lip, squinted like sight would help her make sense of it. When was the first time Sylia had cried in front of Priss? When her feelings for her had come out.

_How much does she not remember?_

She would come around. She would wake up. But minutes passed and Priss was still at her side, her hand pressed over Sylia's with chaste concern. Or maybe more than chaste, as her thumb stroked her knuckles and Sylia looked at her, and whatever expression crossed her face it must have betrayed her because Priss blushed and turned away.

"Heh... sorry," she muttered. "Dunno what's come over me. Seein' you all maudlin... 's makin' me sad. Like I lost somethin' an' forgotten what it was." Incongruously, she started laughing. "Hey, 's like... 's a good song lyric."

Stabbed by Priss' words, she shot Mackie an urgent look, asking with her eyes what she could not voice aloud. _This is what's wrong, isn't it?_

Mackie nodded.

So that was how it would be. This was the break she'd wished for, the outcome she'd been too cowardly to engineer: Priss, free of the trauma. Priss, at peace. Back to the start.

But it had only raised a whole new set of questions. Tell her, and put her through it all a second time-- make both of them relive that horror that some capricious glitch had stolen from her? Lie to her for the rest of her life?

Or push her away, cut her off just like before, without her ever truly knowing the cause?

She could feel Mackie's eyes searching her as well: _What will you do?_ She knew what she wanted to do: pull Priss into her arms, whisper _I'm sorry I hurt you_ over and over; stall any questions she might have with a comforting lie, just enough like the truth to make sense without incriminating herself. Take her hands, those too-soft hands, new and unsullied by the world, and say: _I've been a fool. Let's start over._

And nothing would change.

Sylia wouldn't change. She wouldn't be able to, trapped by her own deceit. And she could never let Priss change, in case she learned too much, and the world marred her again. It would just be another feedback loop.

Putting up her old walls hurt like hell. How had she forgotten, in such a short span of time, how to be cold? How had Priss made her forget what she'd known since her father died? The world did not yield to softness, no matter how much a yearning heart felt like it could change everything. A passionate soul like Priss' was useful when harnessed, as she had done; but it would always be vulnerable to the whims of the wielder. A weapon could only ever be a weapon.

"Your things are all upstairs." If she steeled herself she could erase her tears from time, put on a face so null that not even Priss, having seen it a moment ago, could imagine it being anything else. "I saved as much as I could, but your trailer's a write-off, I'm afraid. Your severance package ought to be more than enough to pay for a new one."

Priss struggled to focus on her, clearly baffled. She could feel Mackie's eyes on her too-- _What the hell are you doing?_ \-- but she stayed resolute. "You're lettin' me go?"

"I'm letting all of you go, Priss." So she really didn't remember being kicked from the team. Another blessing. "I'm disbanding the Knight Sabers."

Priss' eyes were wide. "We... we really fucked up that bad?"

That wasn't so far from the truth. "I did, yes." She sighed. "I've done you all an injustice; put you all at great personal risk for a cause that was ultimately mine. I can't keep this going any longer in good faith."

She could see Priss turning over the possibilities in her head. "...How many casualties?"

"Two," she said, her voice half a whisper. "But that was enough."

"Shit. Anyone I know?"

"Hopefully not." _Not any more, at least. And I hope never again._

"I see." Priss looked despondent and lost, in more ways than one. "So that's it, then? We're just-- over?"

"We're over, yes. I'm sorry," she added, and meant it. "I know what it meant to you... I know you had a lot invested in, in this." She'd almost said _us_. "It was an outlet for a lot of strong feelings, and I... I wanted it to be a safe place for you to express them." She bowed her head. "I'm sorry I couldn't give you that."

Priss stared at her hands. "Yeah."

Sylia held the sheet to her chest, and, with all the grace she could muster, rose from the bed. "You'll be all right, Priss." Softly, she spoke the words that had saved her before, as if by that act they were a charm, a ward against evil. "I have faith in you."

***

The ceiling morphed through hypnagogic patterns, gradient glows sweeping across its surface. Her rationale for having it installed had been that it was better than staring at nothing while she tried to get to sleep, though what it mostly did now was remind her of just how much time she spent staring at the ceiling, trying to get to sleep.

She could have knocked herself out. It wasn't against her principles to use drugs, even the dubiously legal kind normally only available to research facilities -- unless you played the black market, or were Sylia Stingray and held partial ownership of several research facilities, with contacts in a number of others. Really, she didn't even have much against unhealthy drugs; the cigarette that smoldered in her bedside ashtray was proof of that.

What she had a distaste for was the loss of control. On the streets of Megatokyo one saw countless people in the grip of their drug of choice: the destitute and the wealthy alike, or at least the formerly wealthy, the overambitious who'd burned out their brains on the newest nootropics, drooling with the crackheads and smackheads in an egalitarian slurry of failure. There were plenty of safe research chemicals out there, of course, and she conceded that to find them, you needed guinea pigs. But she was no one's guinea pig. Not any more.

She sighed and fished out the old cigarette, taking another pull. Weakness. That was how their lives had come to this: her constant running from any possibility that she might be weak, might have emotions that she couldn't control.

She couldn't face up to what she'd done to Priss, not in the ways that mattered. While Priss napped on the couch in the living room, she was hiding here in her bed from her anger. _Come sleep with me_ was what they both wished her to say, but it would mean she would have to tell the truth. She'd told herself she didn't want to hurt Priss, but all that had meant was that she didn't want to feel guilty. She hadn't even been able to face up to loving her, when it came to it. Had she ever even said those words?

She hated to admit it, but Mackie was right. She kept trying to make a difference, but without ever once changing herself. Just the same old fears, presented in all new ways. Just more excuses to avoid hurting the only person she truly didn't want to hurt: herself.

And she hurt anyway. This wasn't an avoidance of pain, not really, not when she lay here ruminating on Priss when what she wanted to do was hold her, to stop playing the ice queen now that she'd found someone who made her feel.

But nothing would change, because Sylia wouldn't change. 

All this intelligence, squandered in the face of her fears. Perhaps she should have modified herself after all: edited the stubbornness right out. Then at least she could use the brainpower she had on more productive things than this.

As the screen played out its mindless, looping algorithm, she set the cigarette back in the ashtray, where its coal-red eye simmered and, at length, burnt out.


	17. (Priss) Last Show

"Ten minutes, Priss! I'm givin' you one more chance, an' I wanna hear them screamin' your name till the walls fall down, or you are oh-you-tee, OUT! You hearin' me in there, lady?"

Priss sat at her vanity, plucking at the nylon strands of her wig. The songs weren't coming together; even riding her new bike felt like something was wrong, like her body was floating a few centimetres above it. There was a pillowy gauze around everything, and no matter what she did, she couldn't get close enough.

 _I'm hurting over Sylia,_ she thought, but a breakup had never hit this hard before. Not that they'd even broken up; they'd had nothing to break up from, Priss reminded herself, and yet she felt exactly like she'd been dumped. She wanted Sylia in her bed night and day. But where the wounds from past lovers stung brightly, bittersweet slashes that fuelled her music, this-- whatever it was-- had just made her feel numb.

A horrible plan, a sick and manipulative plan, was brewing in her mind. She didn't even know where the thought had come from: she'd been sitting in her trailer, staring emptily at a sheet of music paper, when an image flashed through her head.

It was sudden and stark and nothing like what she normally sang about. She was lying in the road, the victim of a Boomer attack. The thing had fused with her hardsuit, a nightmare she'd had repeatedly: this alien thing creeping under her skin, bonding her armour to her bones, nanomachines chewing away at her humanity.

There was only one escape. She blew the hardsuit off her body, the charges pounding her chest like a defib, rippling through muscles, wrenching at her limbs. There was a tearing pain in her shoulders, so vivid she thought she'd be sick just from the imagining. And then-- a lightness, oddly, a floating feeling, like she'd been relieved of some hidden burden. As if everything up to this point had been somehow wrong, and she'd set the universe back in order.

 _What an ugly way to go._ But the thought wouldn't leave her mind. All that day and into the next it haunted her, whispered in her skull: _You could do this. Steal the suit. Make Sylia think a Boomer got to you; crush her with guilt for leaving you to this fate._

_Oh! Better yet, do it in front of her. If you die, she'll blame herself forever. If you live, she'll never push you away again._

_Either way, she'll love you._

She'd grown to hate it, that demon on her shoulder. It pursued her with a doggedness that was almost human, picking at her resolve, nagging at her every time she wasn't actively doing something else. There was nothing she wanted to do anyway. She was out of ideas, out of options, out of hope. 

One last show. One more chance. She'd gone from toying with her wig to digging a hole in her arm with her nails, her fingers bloody though she felt nothing. She'd scrape her soul raw for them on stage, sing until her throat dried and cracked. If that failed to make her feel anything worth feeling...

"You're up, Priss! Time to go!"

She stabbed the needle into the crook of her elbow. The bite of pain, the cloud of red, brought on a shimmering, spiteful thrill; and then the hit. The warmth in her veins, her lungs, in places that yearned for touch. _The better to fuel the savagery with, my dears._

She turned to the mirror and flashed a poisonous grin. Lipstick: asphyxiated purple. Eyeliner: a deep plum that lit up the red in her eyes, winged to a razor point. Nails: fake, chrome, now stained with blood. Her look: one step away from homicide. Perfect. 

_"Time to go!"_

She stepped through the door, into the embrace of stage lights and applause.

***

Everything on her set list was upbeat. She gave them old songs, covers, anything she could find as long as it was sickeningly happy. But she sang it all with such vitriol that she made her audience feel like they'd never heard these songs before.

She sang in Japanese, then progressed to things she and her fans only barely understood. Between the slurring and snarling and the fact that she just wasn't the greatest at English, she guessed about one in five words were intelligible, tops. But whether she was growling into the mic like the death metal vocalists she mocked, or turning retro-American bubblegum into improv Cocteau Twins-style glossolalia, the fans loved her even more.

It wasn't music she gave them tonight, not really. It was her heart on a slab, the bare honesty of all that she said without words. Her mic was a lifeline and a lover, gripped in feverish hands that alternately caressed it and wrung its neck. Manic tears spilt down her face and were licked from her lips like manna. She flipped off the audience, then got down on their level and purred apologies, slick and bitter and utterly fake. Everyone wanted her, and she wanted no one-- and they knew it. They hadn't paid for her to degrade them, but now that they were here, it was starting to sound a lot like fun.

She scanned the crowd, grinning like a demon. "Every one'a you here! Put your hands up if you're in bed with Genom!" Confusion murmured through the crowd, but a few hands went up, tentatively, and she let out a raucous laugh. "Yeah, that's right! Ain't no one here who's not deep in their shit! You buy Genom's goods, you use Genom's power, you stew in Genom's filth! Even me!"

Something wild and strange was pumping in her veins, something more than the drugs. She grabbed the mic stand as she swayed, her legs trembling, her skin ashy blue in the spotlight. "Ain't no one here hasn't been cursed!" she chanted, as the skin on her hand sloughed off onto the mic. "One day everyone here's gonna be monsters, just like me! And you know the worst thing of all?"

She crouched down on all fours, so close she could touch the fans. One in particular caught her eye, and she laughed and laughed as the face came into focus, morphing, slowly, into that of Sylia Stingray. The cherry liqueur of her dazed eyes met espresso-brown and sharp, each fixating on the other, the rest of the world melting away in a sluggish endorphin haze.

"You're gonna _love_ it."

***

"Priss! Excellent set!"  
"That was killer, man, solid gone!"  
"How'd you do the special effects?"

Sylia marched her through the throng of fans before they could sweep her up and into a crowdsurf. To the chant of her name, they weaved through the halls to a back entrance and opened the door on a Megatokyo night, a blast of smoggy, hot wind assaulting them.

"What are _you_ doing here?" said Priss, shrugging Sylia's hand off her shoulder. "Didn't think I was your taste."

"Maybe you are." Oblivious to the rebuff, or maybe just pushy, she pressed the back of her hand to Priss' forehead. "You're sick."

"Nah, 'm just high. Don't worry abouddit." She tottered a few steps ahead, then stopped as something stabbed her in the foot. Numb from the opiates, it hardly registered, but she looked down anyway.

"Ow," she said without feeling, then laughed at her own restraint. A large metal spike was growing out of her foot right where her heel would be. "Hey, look! Built-in stilettos!"

"We have to get you out of here." Undaunted, Sylia scooped Priss up in her arms and set a brisk pace towards the parking lot. "The rogue nanos were all gone. You shouldn't be--"

"Oh, is that what took me out?" Priss drawled. "Cool. Now I'm a freak just like you, freak."

Sylia stared at her. "How do you know about that?"

"What are you talking about? I just think you're a freak."

"What else are you thinking?" The question bore no trace of hurt. "Any urges to subdue me? To rule over Megatokyo with a nanite fist? Any symbolism involving serpents?"

Seriously, what the hell was she babbling about? "No. Just feel like I wanna die."

"Any voices in your head?"

"Voices?" That one brought her up short. "Is that... the nanomachines?"

"No, not quite. You've had-- my best guess is some kind of personality alteration, caused by... a trauma you sustained. It seems mild for the most part, but--"

"Can you stop it?" Her voice was breathy and urgent.

"No." Cold terror washed over her again, followed by the itching need to _fix._ She could stop it. She could fix it. She just had to-- "If it's an alteration of the data caused by information exchange, it's permanent. We can relieve the symptoms--"

 _No._ No no no no that wasn't good enough, it would never end, she had to make it stop _now_ and there was only one way--

The Silky Doll truck was waiting for them. Mackie wasn't there, and Priss knew she'd get no better chance as Sylia slid open the doors, revealing four hardsuits glistening in their bays.

She lunged for her own, but Sylia was more sober, and tackled her hard to the truck's floor.

"What the hell are you doing?" Sylia yelled.

Priss' response was to slam her spike-heel into Sylia's thigh, making her howl in pain. Pushing her off her, she got to her feet only to be brought low again by a stomach punch, Sylia landing on her back before she could react and grabbing her in a headlock.

The aristo fought dirty now. Fucking wonderful.

Sylia had her pinned firmly against her chest, but she could feel strength rising inside her. With a roar, she clenched her fist and several blades tore through the skin of her arm, Boomer-blue and chrome. She jammed them into Sylia's side and shoved her back against the truck wall, feeling an awful wet wrenching as she ripped them out again. The motion brought tears to Sylia's eyes, and she leaned heavily on the wall, gasping.

"Why are you doing this?" Sylia pleaded as Priss climbed into the hardsuit. "I'm trying to help you!"

"I don't know why!" Priss screamed back, hands fumbling with the clasps that secured the suit's arms. She needed no softsuit: a thousand Boomer filaments instantly burst from her skin and rooted themselves in the suit, bringing it to life. "I just have to! I have to! It's the only way any of this will stop!"

She tugged her helmet on. A forest of stat windows fanned across her vision: _Traumatic injury: Stingray, S. Elevated blood-toxin levels: Asagiri, P. Knight Saber down! Assist at 12 o' clock!_

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I don't hate you... but I can't..." Her fingers found the thumb controls, scrolled through the menus. "Try not to die."

_Click._

_Click-click._

Sylia's voice came weakly from across the truck. "I deactivated it, Priss."

_Click-click-click-click-click-click._

She couldn't even die. Oh God, she couldn't die, and this thing inside her wanted her dead, her heart hammering, her mouth dry, and everything hurt _so much_ , and Sylia...

_Knight Saber down! Assist at 12 o' clock!_

She slumped in the suit, tears of anger welling up. "Dammit!" She kept clicking, trying to wipe away the nightmare: this pain, this hurt, Sylia bleeding out in front of her. The sight resolutely remained. "What now? What now? _What the fuck do I do now?_ "

Sylia pushed off the wall with a laboured groan, one hand clamped against her side. Slowly, she staggered over to Priss, placing a hand on a shoulder that hitched with sobs. At the touch, wires shot out and speared Sylia, burrowing into her hand in search of her nanos; she paid them no mind, even as they spread under her skin, painting it in shades of silver and blue.

"You live," Sylia said, gentle but firm. She stood behind Priss, wrapped arms around her waist, laced bloody fingers with her own: a suit of living armour. "And this time, I do things right."

_Vitals critical: Stingray, S. Assist!_

"I can't," Priss wept. "I can't. I can't take this, I can't, not any more..."

"We'll bear it together."

Warmth wisped over her skin, over and through the hardsuit. Something was happening... something was changing, no, adding to her. She felt like she was bleeding beyond her body, like she was in the air, a mass of charged particles and light.

"Sylia...?" The Boomer blades melted back into Priss' skin, leaving no scar. "What's happening to you? What's happening to me?" Her HUD was still screaming that Sylia's vitals were dropping, but it didn't feel like Sylia was even there any more. Or rather-- no, the opposite. It felt like she was everywhere.

"I've been a coward, Priss." Somehow, the voice was coming from inside her mind: Sylia's voice, warm and echoey, a counterpart to the dark tones of that other voice that whispered in her ear. "I've done nothing but run from your hatred. But I swear, if you hold on, you can hate me as long as you want, for this and everything else. Just, please... don't give up. Not yet."

_Not located: Stingray, S. Out of range._

In a rush of pain and light, a thousand tiny filaments tore themselves from her skin, and Priss' vision whited out.

***

She came to inside the truck, inside a hardsuit that smelt of tears, sweat and stage makeup. Cautiously, remembering the feeling of wires retracting, she tugged at the helmet. It didn't feel attached.

She pulled it off, and a feeling like a monitor degaussing swept over her brain. Blinking, she stared at the helmet in her hands, which now felt suddenly far away. She put it back on, and the world came into clarity again.

_You've got to be shitting me._

Sylia's voice came back online, the smallest hint of whimsy in her tone. _When am I ever not serious?_

The HUD flashed an illegible jumble of symbols and error codes. _...You put yourself in my hardsuit._

_Yes. You can take or leave what I have to give you. Now it's your choice._

She looked at her hands, flexing them experimentally, knowing Sylia felt it too. _My hardsuit,_ she marvelled again.

_I made a mistake in seeing you as my weapon, Priss. But if you like, I'll be your armour. For as long as you need._

She laughed. _You're fucking crazy, Sylia Stingray. Absolutely batshit._

_I'm sure I am. But do you think you can manage to live this way?_

Priss stepped out of the truck and took a few steps across the parking lot. By a railing that ran alongside it, she gazed out over the bay, where the tinsel city of Megatokyo was reflected, glittering, in the black.

 _You could still do it,_ the other voice in her head said. _You could still jump. So easy, with a hardsuit. And doesn't it feel wrong to be alive?_

It still did, kind of. Maybe she'd always have that hole in her heart; maybe she really had been meant to die when Sylvie did. But overlaid on her vision, resolving themselves from the glitches, were words that made trying worthwhile.

_Located: Stingray, S. Coordinate error: resolve?_

She navigated to the dialog and clicked once. _No._ A small sigh escaped her.

 _I'm not sure,_ she said honestly to both of them. _I don't know how I'm gonna feel in a week, in a month._ The bay breeze wafted in, carrying that good old Megatokyo smell of pollution and trash; romantic, she supposed, if you liked rats.

 _...But whatever the case, this is gonna make one_ killer _song lyric._

**-END-**


	18. Omake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a few things I drew for the fic. Spoilers abound! Click the pics for full size.

_Meat Jacket_ promo poster:

[ ](http://imgur.com/cmPsG2C)

A comic spread I drew of Priss' performance in chapter 17, which made a wonderful excuse for gratuitous 80s neon colours. Click for the full thing!

[ ](http://imgur.com/WoOT3ox)

_"...And this time, I do things right."_

[ ](http://imgur.com/WPI3scM)


End file.
